On the home front (a modern medicine appreciation post)

My wife had a hip replacement operation a couple of days ago, and although still in hospital, she's doing pretty well and will almost certainly be back home over the weekend.

She had been suffering from an arthritic (right) hip for a good (I would say) 3 years, although the way the pain radiated down the front of the leg, rather than come from the hip itself, it wasn't obvious from the start what the problem was.   X rays confirmed arthritic changes in the hip, and then there was a 12 month wait while our upgraded private health insurance kicked in, but now it's done.

In the big picture, this is one of those things where you have to have lived long enough to fully appreciate how much the world has improved.   According to this report*, this operation was performed over 50,000 times in Australia last year - a number I found surprisingly high - but that's a lot of people getting relief from some pretty serious pain and (usually) being restored to normal mobility each year. 

All this for an operation which just wasn't available when I was a kid.   (It seems it really only started being done in the late 1960's, and became more widespread over the next couple of decades.)    

One other thing that surprised me about it was the way they get patients "mobilised" and on their feet within a mere 2 to 3 hours from the operation.   As I expected, this is a well researched topic - that early mobilisation helps - but I wonder who first decided to test this.  I would bet that there was some time, probably when I was a kid (but maybe earlier), when doctors and nurses would have thought that it was a ridiculous idea to interfere with bed rest and get bodies moving so soon after major surgery.  But someone must have tried it, and kept pushing the timing earlier and earlier, and found it helped.  Did other nurses think that the pioneers in pushing for earlier and earlier mobilisation were cruel?    (I will look more into the history of this soon).

Anyway, all's well that end's well - assuming no problems arise over the next few weeks!

*  Maybe COVID delays account for some of this figure?  Here's the full paragraph:

As devices now last longer, they are going into younger people and the average age of acquiring a device is now 66. In the past decade, joint replacement became more popular. There were 51,894 hip replacements last year, which was a 95 per cent increase on 2002. Knee replacements increased 139 per cent over the past decade to 67,742 in 2022.