Small-cap med-tech investing is a good news/bad news sort of proposition. The good and bad news is that these stocks occasionally get cheap when investors panic about guidance, competition, legal threats, or the color of the CEO's tie. Of course, it can be a little frustrating waiting in the in-between times for another crack at a company you like.

With that in mind, maybe Medtronic (NYSE:MDT) is going to be doing future Kyphon (NASDAQ:KYPH) shareholders a favor with its recent lawsuit. After all, lawsuits tend to involve a lot of posturing, appeals, and time spent waiting for the judicial gears to grind into action. That can sometimes produce downdrafts in the stock market that let you buy shares a little more cheaply. And for those who think this is a Goliath-vs.-David match-up ... you might be right, but David is coming to this fight packin'.

Why would you want to bother with Kyphon? The answer, my friends, is in the growth.

Kyphon posted 38% sales growth in the most recent quarter, with 30% growth here at home and 90% growth overseas. Gross margins remain an eye-popping 88% and operating margins (on an adjusted basis) continue to climb.

What's more, the numbers get more interesting when you realize that this market is still widely underserved. I know some surgeons and practitioners are going to disagree with my conclusion here, but there are hundreds of thousands of vertebral compression fractures each year (about 700,000 in this country, actually) and less than half of those are diagnosed. Of those that are, a large portion are treated with palliative therapy -- that is, "you've broken your back, but we're not gonna fix it." Somehow, I just don't see that continuing when the "Me Generation" (aka baby boomers) are the ones starting to get the fractures.

On top of that, there are another 500,000 annual fractures in Japan, and the company has a clinical trial ongoing that should get them into the Japanese market before decade's end. And while the Japanese aren't always as aggressive with treating health problems as we are (at least not those that don't involve erectile disfunction), the anecdotal sight of a lot of hunched-over obaasans on the streets of Edogawadai makes me think there's a market there.

These shares are on the expensive side, even for a fast-growing med-tech company, so I'm inclined to wait for a setback. Still, I can't help but admit that waiting isn't always easy or satisfying.

Fool contributor Stephen Simpson has no financial interest in any stocks mentioned (that means he's neither long nor short the shares).