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Well, hip arthroscopy is a technique that's applicable to a wide variety of
patients.
You will get young teenagers who are doing activities such as gymnastics
or
ballet dancing who will get a labral tear which will be treatable with
arthroscopy. You will get the young, more aggressive athletes in their 20s
and 30s
doing sports such as basketball, baseball,
football. Hockey is a real common one and you will get the middle-aged athletes who
are doing
tennis, golf and running, and they will also
need hip arthroscopy as well. Lately we've also been exploring a
possibility of
delaying the need for hip replacement surgery by
treating people with early stages of arthritis as well.
So what are we able to accomplish with hip arthroscopy?
The fact that it's a minimally invasive procedure
lends itself to a faster recovery from
a traditional open surgery and what we end up doing is by looking inside the
hip joint, we have to
open up or distract the hip joint and insert a camera
with a telescope called an arthroscope and this allows us to really visualize
the inside of the hip joints.
We're able to clean up damaged tissue, repair damage tissue,
remove debris and even remove damaged cartilage that can allow
a faster recovery than traditional open procedures.
I'm a runner and I go running everyday
and in the beginning, it started out with just a little bit of pain when I move
my leg.
But afterwards, it's getting worse, getting more and more.
Also when I did my yoga lessons,
it started to be awkward to move
in some positions and that's when I started to really
know I have to do something. Yeah, Harriet is a great example of a
population that we have here. They like to stay youthful. They like to stay
active
even though they're maybe middle-aged and she was a very avid runner.
She would refuse to stop running despite having problems with her hip
but she just had to keep going
and that's not uncommonly seen in the Bay Area. She got to the point where she
did
have difficulty even crossing her legs or going up and down the stairs without
having rather severe hip pain
and she tried physical therapy, medications
and none of this was helping her. It was a little frustrating.
Her X-rays were negative. But she came to have hip arthroscopy which
really helped her out.
The recovery from hip arthroscopy is really dependent upon
the type of procedure that's performed.
Generally it's an outpatient procedure so the patients can usually go home the
same day
or the following morning and usually they are on crutches
for a couple of days for up to a week.
Some patients can actually return to work the very next week.
Dependent upon the extent of the procedure, they may
have a recovery that might require several weeks to a few months.
The first time I noticed really a difference
in terms of the hip pain was when I rolled on my
right side in the night and there was no pain.
That was when I really realized it's gone.
Six weeks after the surgery,
I went out the first time running again and I was told not to go over
two to four miles. I did six
and I felt perfectly fine. My hip was not hurting
and I just felt like new.
Hip arthroscopy has actually been around for
a few decades but has had a fair resurgence over the last 10 years
and I think it's probably one of the fastest growing
arthroscopic procedures in the country.
But because it's fairly technically demanding, only
a few percentage of orthopedic surgeons perform this procedure.
If you are someone who is suffering from ongoing hip pain
that has been unrelieved with traditional, more conservative measures, that you
should
seek out the opinion of an especially trained orthopedic surgeon who is familiar
with
hip arthroscopy for an evaluation to see if this would be helpful
to you.