Here’s the part of this story that’s interesting to readers who are not my parents. Like a lot of other patients, I found there was no consensus on how best to treat my common ailment. One doctor wanted to operate. Another told me to try physical therapy. I had to become a detective of sorts, interrogating friends in the medical community and scouring the Internet for data on the best course of treatment. This common-sense approach is known as evidence-based medicine. In short, you go with the doctor whose treatment produces the best outcomes in controlled clinical studies, not the doctor with the nicest smile.

That certainly wouldn’t have been the first orthopedist I saw. He came highly recommended by my primary-care physician, and the wall of his examining room sported a photo of Joe Montana, signed with the quarterback’s personal thanks. But the guy did everything but charge at me with a scalpel. At my age and activity level, he assured me, I had a 90 percent chance of dislocating the shoulder again. I needed surgery, the sooner the better. “Without it, I guarantee you’ll be back in this room within the year,” he said. The doctor’s aggressive demeanor didn’t sit well, but I scheduled the $8,000-plus procedure anyway for the following Monday (luckily, health insurance would pick up the tab). Then, on Sunday afternoon, I talked to a family friend, a back surgeon who was appalled that anyone would prescribe surgery for a first-time dislocation. He consulted a colleague and reported back that six months of physical therapy was the traditional treatment, and that my chances for redislocating it were not 90 percent but more like 50 percent. The first doctor “sounds like he’s trying to put bread on the table,” he told me.

So there I was, caught in the slipstream of differing medical opinions and seemingly incongruent statistics. This is where Dr. Mark Ebell, a proponent of evidence-based medicine at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine, recommends that bewildered patients quiz their doctors for the medical research that underlies their opinions. “It’s important that patients push their physicians a bit and learn to ask questions like, ‘What’s the evidence that this test or treatment is going to help me live better or longer?’ " Ebell maintains an archive at infopoems.com to help doctors stay abreast of the latest studies, warnings and drug discoveries for specific maladies. He also urges patients to do their own research on the Net. One useful site is medlineplus.com, maintained by the National Library of Medicine, which provides an ad-free database of thousands of biomedical magazines and journals, and a searchable catalog of information about specific diseases and conditions. Another good starting point is the Cochrane Collaboration (cochrane.de), a growing international library of well-controlled clinical studies. There’s obviously a limit to what a novice can glean from these jargon-filled papers, but it can’t hurt to walk into a doctor’s office armed with references to a few relevant studies of your ailment.

In my own research, I visited the Web site of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (www.aaos.org) and read about one clinical trial at West Point Academy in 1993. Thirty-six athletes with my injury were divided into two groups: 21 got the surgery, the remaining 15 got a sling and four months of supervised rehabilitation. Those going under the knife fared much better: 86 percent enjoyed normal shoulder function over the next three years, while 80 percent of the rehabbers experienced problems within 10 months. Dr. Joseph Zuckerman, chairman of the Academy’s council of education and a professor at New York University, says the West Point study and similar follow-up trials have made doctors like my first orthopedist more aggressive with shoulder injuries. He also notes that “there are very few absolutes in orthopedics.” But if I had known about those recent trials during my first appointment, I might have been less skittish about heading right into surgery.

After doing the research and getting an MRI and another doctor’s opinion, I’ve settled for a combination of the two approaches. An energetic therapist is helping me rehabilitate the shoulder, while monitoring my range of motion to see how the joint heals. Unfortunately the injury has created bits of torn tissue that often catch uncomfortably when I move the arm. If that’s still the case in a few months, I’ll probably take a deep breath and go for the surgery. It’s an evidence-based approach that feels a lot more comfortable than blindly following one doctor instead of another. Of course, I could dislocate the shoulder again, with or without the surgery. But one thing is for sure: I’m not diving for any more of those long fly balls.