Carlos Delgado’s undergoing arthoscopic hip surgery soon. Delgado has a bone spur and a torn labrum in his hip; more on these conditions at a later date.

What exactly is arthroscopic hip surgery? It’s actually really cool. The word is from arthros (joint) and scope (to look inside).

Basically think of putting a little slit in your side, slipping a tiny camera through, looking at all the insides and fixing whatever might be wrong. It’s all done through a small incision which means less time to recovery. If you take a look at the pictures below you can see a little more of what is going on. The arthroscope is the camera, the shaver is, well, a shaver. You can basically take little bites of bone to "shave" it down. If there’s a bone spur, there might be muscles getting "stuck" on there. Shaving that bone spur down will let those muscles not get caught up anymore and hopefully allow for full recovery. Recovery time is usually in a week or so. You can usually start walking right after the surgery. You can see exactly what the surgeon sees on that second image

Some problems can be treated great using this approach. If there are bone spurs, those can be shaved, if there is a torn labrum that can be fixed. Of course a lot of problems cannot be fixed through a tiny little hole. I know a lot of doctors who are really skeptical of knee arthoplasties for various pathologies. But I’ve honestly not read much research on outcomes from hip arthoplasties. I sure hope this works for Carlos…

via oporthopedics.com

via www.csosortho.com