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Total Knee Replacement Archives | Orthoped

Infection after total knee replacement

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Nutrition and Joint Care

Nutrition

    • Glucosamine and Chondroitin
      Although the book title is a bit of a misnomer, The Arthritis Cure details the importance of glucosamine and chondroitin to the health of cartilage. Glucosamine can be purchased over-the-counter at health food stores, pharmacies, and discount stores as glucosamine sulfate or glucosamine HCl, often in combination with chondroitin sulfate. The labelling often recommends an initial dose of 1500 mg of glucosamine sulfate and 1200 mg of chondroitin sulfate for 60 days, then a maintenance dose of 500 mg of each daily following that.Some have argued that chondrotin is a very large molecule and may be difficult to be absorbed into the bloodstream. Because glocusamine is a sugar, some have suggested large doses may increase your risk of developing diabetes. Also, if your cartilage is severly damaged, added nutrients may be akin to throwing fertilizer on the sidewalk and expecting grass to grow.

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Candidate for Total Knee Replacement?

Who decides whether you will have a total knee replacement operation? Curiously enough, you are the boss, you decide!

  • Your surgery depends principally on your willingness to comply with the long, demanding post-operative physical therapy and rehabilitation program that follow the surgery.
  • All other considerations (your age, disease character, etc.) are secondary.
  • The decision to have the operation of a damaged knee joint is a highly personal matter, and only you can make that decision, together with your surgeon.

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Concerns before Total Knee surgery

1. Preoperative anxiety

You have had no previous experience with total knee replacement operation and it is only natural that you are anxious. Feeling of anxiety and depression before the total knee operation is usual for all patients. (Curiously enough, patients with previous experience, people with the other knee already operated on, are anxious too).
The preoperative anxiety disappears during the week after the operation when you have realized that the surgery has succeeded and all is well. Your preoperative anxiety will be replaced be feelings of relaxation and relief.
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Young for Total Knee Replacement

Curiously enough, high age is no obstacle for a total knee replacement, but low age is!

Studies demonstrated that:

  • only 25% surgeons were against total knee replacement operations in patients aged over 80 years, whereas
  • 65% surgeons were against total knee operations in patients younger than 50 years

Why?

Here are some answers: (more…)

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Post Surgical Care

Home Preparation Items

Check with your doctor and hospital about what you will need. Generally you will be provided with the following equipment or need to obtain them from a home health equipment store. In most cases these devices will be needed for the first six weeks to help avoid the risk of dislocation before the hip capsule heals. Some of these devices may be helpful before surgery to make life less painful. I bought a reacher about a year before surgery and it helped a lot. (more…)

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Diagnostic methods used in total knee surgery

To arrive at the right diagnosis of the knee joint disease may be easy in some cases and it may involve several diagnostic procedures in other cases. Here follows a short description of some diagnostic methods: (more…)

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Surgical Issues

Choosing a Doctor

The best indicators of success of a surgeon is the number of surgeries performed per year, experience with the tools and device, and the number of hip replacement surgeries per year for the hospital. If a doctor is doing 50 hip replacements or resurfacings per year, he or she is doing at least one per week and is more likely to have experience with a wide variety of patients and surgical challenges and is more likely to be on top of the latest techniques and hardware than a surgeon doing fewer. (more…)

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Diseases of the knee joint

Contents:

The diseases that most frequently lead to the total knee surgery are:

  • Osteoarthritis (primary and following after knee damages) = ca 80%
  • Rheumatoid arthritis = ca 15%
  • Conditions after fractures of the knee joint= ca 4%

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Identification of bacteria

How do the bacteriologists decide which bacteria is causing the postoperative wound infection?

In about 130 years the bacteriologists used the relatively simple method to smear the pus or the swabs from the wound on to special substrate. The substrate is either fast, gelatin-like substance agar mixed with blood; or liquid, a kind of nutritious soup in a bottle.

Pus containing Staphylococcus aureus bacteria was smeared on the surface of the blood-agar plate. The blood-agar plate is within a glass dish and is covered by another dish to prevent downfall of other bacteria from the air. The whole culture is grown for at least 2 days in a constant temperature (32-37 degrees Celsius). (more…)

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