The trend towards 'surgery through smaller and smaller incisions' now includes an orthopedic procedure:
http://my.webmd.com/content/Article/77/90340.htm?printing=true "...The Zimmer Minimally Invasive Solutions 2-Incision technique allows surgeons to install the same artificial hip joint through two small incisions -- each no more than 2 inches long -- rather than the traditional single incision between 4 and 12 inches long. By doing this with new smaller surgical instruments designed by Berger, an MIT-trained mechanical engineer-turned-surgeon, those who perform hip replacement surgery can now operate between muscles, tendons, and ligaments rather than cutting through these soft tissues...
"...With this technique, first performed in February 2001, nearly 90% of patients leave the hospital the day of or day after their hip replacement surgery, instead of the traditional weeklong stay. The technique is also proving to be virtually pain-free in many patients and results in less surgery blood loss and less chance of post-operation blood clots. It also reduces or eliminates months of grueling rehabilitation therapy and is proving to drastically cut the risk of later chance of limping...
"...And since months of the rehabilitation process can cost $20,000 or more per patient, and many getting hip replacement surgery are on Medicare, by reducing that rehabilitation to days or eliminating it altogether, the health-care system can save billions of dollars a year..."
Like its endoscopic predecessors, this minimizing technique demands a higher level of expertise from the surgeon, and similarly is not appropriate for everyone (muscle-bound or very obese, in this case). I suspect that there will be a small number of cases that must be 'turned into' a conventional hip replacement, just as, because of complicating factors, some endoscopic cholecystectomies have to be converted to a full laparotomy for removal of the gallbladder.
It's not in PubMed yet.
Debbi
Been nice if they'd discovered it a quarter of a century earlier, before my mother had both of them replaced, after all else she had gone through with her back and hips and all after the chimney fell on top of the bed she had gotten under when the tornado hit their house when she was about twelve years old . . .
-- Ronn! :)
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