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who generally do much better with surgery than older, sicker people.
....But hey, I’m not that cynical, so I don’t put much emphasis on that possibility, at least not for Canadian orthopedic surgeons, some of whom are actually friends of mine. ....As for American orthopedic specialists, well, let’s just say that in the US, they often “do things” just because they can and because someone can pay for it.
....The second potential reason for the mushrooming of “large joint” replacements in ever-younger adults is that baby boomers yell louder and longer about pain than anyone who ever came before, so some boomers may be getting these operations at much earlier stages of disease progression than prior generations got them simply because boomers are putting up a much greater fuss than their grandparents did.
....Again, that opinion is too cynical for words, and since I still have a few baby boomer friends (Gerry probably not being one of them any more), let me say that I don’t put much credence in that explanation either.
....No, for me, a much more likely explanation as to why large joint replacements are now being done so often in younger people is that many boomers have developed severe forms of that condition known as osteoarthritis (OA), which is destroying their joints at younger ages than has ever occurred before. |
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....A man I know, whom I shall call “Gerry” (his real name is actually Gerald, but I’m going to call him Gerry to hide his identity), recently had both his hips replaced, and that’s a notable occurrence for at least two reasons.
....First, Gerald (oops, excuse me), I mean “Gerry”, only had to wait one year in the queue which means that he was either severely disabled or in a great deal of pain (and knowing how much Gerry, a typical male, complains about even a paper cut, I’ll bet his medical handlers were fully aware of every twitch Gerry suffered), or more likely, Gerry had “pull”, which, in this era of multi-tier, |
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whom-you-know-often-helps-you-get-faster-service medicine, is probably the real reason Gerry got such comparatively quick action.
....But the thing that really grabbed me about Gerry’s story is not his short wait or his pain – hey, I can easily live with someone else’s pain – but rather that Gerry is a relatively young man of 55, although to be honest (as younger people always seem to say to midlifers partly in awe that they’re still alive), he doesn’t look a day over 54, and the reason that caught my attention is that as recently as ten years ago, the mid-fifties was an unheard of age for joint replacement surgery.
But according to recent Canadian data, that is no longer true and in fact that kind of major surgery at such a comparatively young age is becoming pretty routine.
....Why?
....Several reasons.
....The first – and most cynical – reason is that “large joint” replacement (hip and knee) surgery has become a cottage industry, especially in younger adults, simply because the technology has improved so much that these operations are now much easier to do, so we’re now able to offer such operations (time, space, money, and surgical skills permitting, of course) to vastly larger numbers of people, and in medicine, nothing expands as quickly as a surgical service in need of patients, especially young patients, |
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