I'm still being inconvenienced by my knee, with not much improvement. Little things, like walking down stairs in the morning and kicking off the wall in the lap pool cause the old familiar pain to resonate around my joint.
A new manifestation of my knee trouble: my left (good) knee has started to ache. Nothing specific, just a generalized throbbing pain after strenuous activity. After a big hike, both my knees now hurt. The difference is that one dissipates gradually and the other lingers around. This whole time, the idea of a knee rebuild rests in the back of my head, waiting for the pain to infiltrate before giving me motivation to pull the trigger. Yes it sounds like an easy answer, but execution is the challenge.
Working at the university, I have access to an immense amount of scientific literature and research. My inquiries up to now have been limited to my work, but yesterday I took the plunge into knee arthroplasty. I was immediately inundated with information. Most of it involves total knee arthroplasty, which has a solid depth of published research and data, so much that a majority of the papers center on long-term outcomes. At this point in time, most are 20-30 year survivorship studies looking at the longevity and the durability of these things.
So far the data has been impressive, especially partial knee replacements. The field has come a long way since its infancy in the 60's and 70's. But with every ten promising papers, there's one that questions my slightest notion of even doing this procedure. Just when I'm fully convinced of this revolutionary medical procedure, I read a paper about something like poor long-term outcomes or catastrophic component failures. I've read so many papers now that it all sounds like a mad scientist experiment. Where can I get a little real-world experience on the subject?
A new manifestation of my knee trouble: my left (good) knee has started to ache. Nothing specific, just a generalized throbbing pain after strenuous activity. After a big hike, both my knees now hurt. The difference is that one dissipates gradually and the other lingers around. This whole time, the idea of a knee rebuild rests in the back of my head, waiting for the pain to infiltrate before giving me motivation to pull the trigger. Yes it sounds like an easy answer, but execution is the challenge.
Working at the university, I have access to an immense amount of scientific literature and research. My inquiries up to now have been limited to my work, but yesterday I took the plunge into knee arthroplasty. I was immediately inundated with information. Most of it involves total knee arthroplasty, which has a solid depth of published research and data, so much that a majority of the papers center on long-term outcomes. At this point in time, most are 20-30 year survivorship studies looking at the longevity and the durability of these things.
So far the data has been impressive, especially partial knee replacements. The field has come a long way since its infancy in the 60's and 70's. But with every ten promising papers, there's one that questions my slightest notion of even doing this procedure. Just when I'm fully convinced of this revolutionary medical procedure, I read a paper about something like poor long-term outcomes or catastrophic component failures. I've read so many papers now that it all sounds like a mad scientist experiment. Where can I get a little real-world experience on the subject?