Explosion of Hip Revisions: How to Handle Them (Orthopedics This Week)
There is at least one doctor at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) who is righting an increasing number of surgical wrongs. Geoffrey H. Westrich, M.D. is Research Director of the Adult Reconstruction and Joint Replacement Service at HSS. Dr. Westrich has found himself being sought after for hip revisions, doing several per month on patients who fly in from all across the country. He told OTW, “I’ve just published an article in Arthroplasty on how to approach recalled hip replacements. The original idea was to allow surgeons to intraoperatively do more customization of hip replacements. We traditionally put in a stem which includes a neck; the only modularity we had before that was with the head. The newer designs allowed a modular neck that allowed surgeons to put in a stem and then put in a neck (with a choice of many different lengths and angles). It also came in neutral, anteverted, or retroverted. This allowed us to place the stem in a way that accommodates the patient’s anatomy; it also allows us to intraoperatively select a neck that gave us the best chance of restoring leg length offset.”
“The greatest ri...
