Posted on 05/15/2008 8:45:54 AM PDT by Dr. Scarpetta
The first time John Johnson's artificial hip squeaked, he was bending down to pick up a pine cone in his yard in Thomasville, Georgia. Johnson looked up, expecting to find an animal nearby.
Susan O'Toole, a nutritionist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, who first squeaked going up stairs after getting home from her hip-replacement surgery in 2005, said she thought the banister she was gripping needed repair.
And Edward Heary, an apprentice appraiser in Hatboro, Pennsylvania, said clients sometimes look with embarrassment or concern at their floorboards when he walks though their homes.
As those three patients - and hundreds of others - discovered once they pinpointed the source of the noise, they had become guinea pigs in an unfolding medical mystery.
Their artificial hips are made of CERAMIC materials that were promoted as being much more durable than older models. But for reasons not yet fully understood, their hips started to squeak, raising questions about whether the noises herald more serious malfunctions.
"There is something amiss here," said Douglas Padgett, chief of adult reconstructive and joint replacement service at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
So far,so good. In fact,most of the time I forget I have a replacement.
Six months or so after the hip I had four discs removed and replaced by ceramic coated titanium discs and the whole thing filled with morphogenic surgical protein,which after electro-magnetic field stimulation over a period of time turned into bone.
Voila! No more pain after thirty years of it.My wife says my grumpiness has diminished too.
No squeaks from my body!
Ping to Post #20
INjecting some kind of bioabsorbable neutral lubricant similar to whale oil under floroscopy might work.
Something like that might work. My doc said it only takes lubricant “microns thick” to be effective —
PJ
Maybe he knew what he was talking about...
Glad to hear you're doing so well!
OK, I am not involved in research but common sense says to me if the device is squeaking that means friction and friction causes wear and ultimately device failure and another surgery.....
That could force patients to undergo the very operation - a second replacement of the same hip joint - they had hoped to avoid by choosing ceramics.
If the public becomes educated, maybe they will be able to make a more informed choice before surgery...
bump
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