Ankle Ligament Surgery? Do You Really Need it?

Do you need surgery for a torn ligament in the ankle? What is ankle reconstruction surgery? How long is the recovery from ankle surgery? Let’s dig in. Which Ankle Ligaments? The ankle ligaments that are most commonly injured are the ones on the outside. I have highlighted these in yellow in the image on the…
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Stem Cells and Severe Ankle Arthritis: A Nepal Trekker Gets Her Hike Back

I see great stories from patients who we’ve treated with interventional orthobiologics all day, but I tend to write about the ones that surprise me. This is the story of a truly crazy path to recovery that begins in Nepal, circles through Grand Cayman, and then finally back to Denver. The craziest thing about this…
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Gastrocnemius Recession Review: Should You Get This Invasive Surgery?

I have a list of surgeries that I classify as something like “They did what to you?” One of those is called gastrocnemius recession, a procedure that is increasingly being used to treat heel pain. Recently, a podiatrist read one of my other posts on the procedure and wrote in the comments that he disagreed.…
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Why a Normal MRI Report May Be an Increasingly Dangerous Thing…

We see patients every day who have normal MRI’s and pain and patients who have abnormal MRI’s and little pain. I’ve blogged about this extensively. Given that, for orthopedic imaging, a well-trained and observant physician can usually find more than the reading radiologist and also knows where to look, reading the MRI personally is a…
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Toe Joint Fusion Recovery: One Patient’s Story

This week I met a patient who had a toe joint fusion. However, this was a disaster of sorts. The good news was that her toe felt better, but the bad news was that her ankle felt worse. Why? Because her toe joint fusion recovery was a long-drawn-out process that forced energy from her toe…
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The Knee Bone’s Connected to the Ankle Bone

When patients come in with a knee problem, they’re often confused when we start examining their ankle. It turns out the writers of the old song “The Knee Bone’s Connected to the Ankle Bone” were wiser than the obvious connection as a knee and an ankle are simply specialized parts of the same machine, and…
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A Maximally Damaged Ankle and Surprising Results

When I first met Don and he showed me his ankle, I think I said or thought, “Wow!” It was twice as big as his other ankle due to the surgical free flaps, and his MRI looked like a bomb had gone off in his talus bone. When we discussed whether stem cells could help, I think…
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Treating Severe Ankle Arthritis with Stem Cells

We’re hard on ourselves. Based on the almost 10,000 stem-cell-treated patients on whom we’ve tracked and recorded outcomes, we have noted several trends. Based on that data, we often tell patients that they’re not great candidates for an injection of their own stem cells. Sometimes they prove us wrong. The video above was sent by a…
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