Joint Replacement

Activity Increase for Active Patients After Knee Replacement Not Realistic

As I’ve said before, the single biggest growth area in knee replacements has been younger and more active patients. You see ads on buses, on billboards, in the newspaper, and on TV ads where young and active people are climbing mountains or running with their “brand-new” knee. The problem with that business model is reality. Here’s…read more

Exactly How Crazy Expensive Is Knee Replacement? Good Question

As we work with more and more companies on replacing invasive and expensive orthopedic surgery with interventional orthopedics, the question of the cost of orthopedic surgery comes up. The problem, as I’ll review today, is that the costs are all over the map. To show you what I mean, this morning, we’ll look at the…read more

RIP Cervical Disc Replacement: Side Effects Same as Fusion

I’ll never forget when a local surgeon, who was being paid handsomely by disc replacement manufacturers, placed his new credo “friends don’t let friends fuse” on his website. The idea was that now that we had disc replacement technology, keeping some motion in the spine would reduce the side effects compared to fusion. For the…read more

Avoiding Knee Replacement and Back Fusion and Still Dancing in the Caribbean

Our orthopedic surgery care system is dangerously broken. Why? Surgeons teach patients to obsess over the structure of their bones, cartilage, and joints to sell surgical procedures that we now know, for the most part, aren’t needed or are barely better than doing nothing. That same “scared into surgery” fate would have befallen Sherry, but after being…read more

Don’t Count on a Knee Replacement to Improve Pain or Function

I see these ads on buses in my town with pictures of middle-aged people rock climbing with their new knee replacements. However, is this reality? For example, I’ve blogged before on research showing that many patients feel no better or have no greater function after knee replacement. And it isn’t just this one study; many…read more

Hypersensitivity Before Knee Replacement May Mean More Pain After Surgery

Some patients do poorly after knee replacement and some do great. Now there may be a way to figure out who is going to do poorly, and it relates to nerve hypersensitivity. This fits with our idea that many patients with knee pain and arthritis really have nerve issues elsewhere like the low back. Let…read more

Are All Hip Replacement Devices Associated with Pseudotumors?

A few years back, I blogged on a research study that looked at masses that were associated with metal-on-metal hip replacement surgeries called pseudotumors. However, now new research shows that these awful side effects may be more common than anyone realized and occur with other types of hip replacement devices as well. In fact, they…read more

Unnecessary Knee Replacements Are a Surgical Epidemic

The sales tail has always wagged the dog in medicine. Meaning sales targets for drugs and devices and aggressive sales reps have always determined more about what care is offered to patients than actual medical need. One of the biggest areas of abuse has always been orthopedics. In addition, one of the biggest abuse areas…read more