#264 ‒ Hip, knee, ankle, and foot: common injuries, prevention, and treatment options
Episode Stats
Length
2 hours and 10 minutes
Words per Minute
178.28151
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Adam Cohen, a Board Certified Orthopaedic Surgeon and Team Physician for Horace Mann Athletics, joins Dr. Atiyah to discuss the lower extremities of the human body, including the hip, knee, ankle, and foot. Dr. Cohen discusses what causes injuries, what can go wrong, and what causes them, as well as the surgical and non-surgical management of these injuries. He also discusses how to find a good surgeon if you need any of these issues addressed.
Transcript
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Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,
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my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity
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into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and
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wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely
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important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads to do this. Our work
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is made entirely possible by our members. And in return, we offer exclusive member only content
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and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of
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this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price
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of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership,
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head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. My guest this week is Dr. Adam Cohen.
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Adam is board certified in both orthopedic surgery and sports medicine and has extensive training
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and expertise in various sports medicine injuries. He's the director of sports medicine at Ortho
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Manhattan and serves as the team physician for Horace Mann Athletics. He also holds academic
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appointments at the NYU Langone Health System and the Mount Sinai Health System. Adam previously served
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as the assistant team physician for the New York Yankees and served as a consultant for the U.S.
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Open tennis championship, as well as provided orthopedic coverage for the New York City Ballet.
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This episode is in some ways a follow-up to the episode I did with Dr. Alton Barron, which focused on
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the upper extremity. In this episode with Adam, we're going to focus on everything you need to know
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about the lower extremities. This includes, of course, the hip, knee, ankle, and foot. For each
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of these, we walk through the anatomy, what can go wrong, what causes injuries, as well as what
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surgical and non-surgical management of these things looks like. We then end the conversation
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looking at how someone can go and find a good surgeon if they need any of these issues addressed
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as we discuss them today. In addition to our conversation where Adam, of course, uses these images
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and models, he also runs me through the typical exams that he will do for each part of his
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assessment. These exams will make a lot more sense if you can see them rather than hear them. So for
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the audio portion of this podcast, we will not include any of the exam content. It simply won't
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make any sense. So if you choose to listen to this in audio, you may still want to go and check out our
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YouTube page to look for the exams. Of course, you may just choose to watch the entire thing on YouTube
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so that you can see his images. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Adam Cohen.
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Hey Adam, thank you so much for coming from New York to Austin. Very excited to do this. And of
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course, this needs to be done in person. We're going to do today what I did with your colleague,
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Dr. Barron, a little while ago on the upper extremity, which is everything you need to know
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about the lower extremity and its orthopedic injuries. So for each of the major issues, the
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hip, the knee, the foot, we're going to talk about the anatomy, talk about what goes wrong.
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We'll talk about the surgical and non-surgical management for those things. So thanks very much
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for joining. Sure. Great. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Let's start with the hip. Let's jump
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right in. So let's talk about the anatomy of the hip. The hip joint is a ball and socket joint.
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I have a model here. Unlike the shoulder, it's a very contained concentric joint and much more stable
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under normal circumstances than the shoulder. It's a deep socket. The socket is called the acetabulum.
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This is the femoral head and the femoral head is covered with cartilage. We'll place this down for
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a moment. If we just focus on the proximal femur, we have the head, as I mentioned, the neck,
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and this is the subtrochanteric region. And this is the trochanteric region. The acetabulum
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is formed in utero. It starts about fourth week in utero. And then by the 30th week,
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it starts to develop. And I think that's a good starting spot because a lot of the problems that
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we see or a number of the problems we see in the hip really start that early. There is a condition
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called developmental dysplasia of the hip. It used to be referred to as congenital dysplasia of the hip,
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but we felt that there are more factors involved than any congenital ones in particular. Basically,
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what happens is if the hip is not concentrically reduced as either late in stages of pregnancy or
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in early childhood, the first several months of life, in fact, the acetabulum will not form properly.
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So, for example, if the ball is shifted out of the socket, let's say due to positioning in utero where
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it's not completely in, the acetabulum will not form correctly. What that means is, is that after
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birth, if it's sitting outward, this deep socket will not form and it'll be quite shallow. That has
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major implications later in life because if it's not deep in the socket, it's sitting on the edge of the socket,
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which means there's greater pressure here and that pressure can lead to mechanical overload and arthritis.
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So, even conditions that happen much later in life can start quite early.
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So, a child that's breached, for example, during pregnancy, one of our kids was breached. As soon as he was born,
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they immediately said, he has hip dysplasia. He was in a brace for nine months. He was in a
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splayed open brace for nine months. And I remember sort of freaking out thinking, oh my God, he's never
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going to be able to do anything. And they're like, no, he'll be fine. Like, as long as you keep him in
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this brace. And he was in that brace 23 hours and 45 minutes a day. He basically only came out of it for
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a bath. It was actually hell on my wife. But nine months later, his hips were fine. That's kind of
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So, it's called a Pavlik harness and it actually is quite comfortable for the child. You can put it on
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and take it off without much of a fuss. No more fuss than normally. But we know that if the ball is not
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sitting in there, in that socket, it will not form properly. So, the harness keeps that positioning
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until the acetabulum forms properly. You know, the exams that pediatricians do, we always check the hip
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and we want to make sure that it's in the socket. I think going forward, a lot more physicians and
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orthopedic pediatric specialists are using ultrasound to better quantify that the hip is in the socket
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because we really don't want to miss any dysplastic hips. If you have a dysplastic hip, you are going to
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get arthritis. Now, it doesn't mean it's going to be symptomatic necessarily. It doesn't mean you're
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going to need a hip replacement. But people who have dysplastic hips, that is an acetabulum that did
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not form properly, are going to get arthritis. It's a mechanical problem where the forces are
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unevenly distributed across that ball and there's edge loading and that will break down over time,
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no matter what you do. Do we have a sense of what the incidence is of congenital dysplasia or whatever
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the new name is? Developmental dysplasia of the hip. As far as... How many children born or for every
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thousand kids that are born? I think it's about one in a thousand. I think I might be wrong. I would
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need to check on those numbers. The important part is, is that we shouldn't miss any. And if we're basing
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it solely on an exam, I think we're going to miss more than if we base it on ultrasound. And the
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ultrasound is really not that hard to do and certainly teachable. But that confirms that the
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ball is in the socket and the socket is healing properly. There was a study once done many, many
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years ago where it was an animal study and they put a cube-shaped object in the acetabulum and the
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acetabulum formed in the shape of a cube. It is going to develop based on what is sitting in that
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area. And if you wait too long, what happens is the soft tissue deep in the socket will become
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hypertrophied and it's harder to get in. So I have patients that I've seen who they come in to see me
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because their hip hurts. They're 28, 29 years old, never had a problem before, did not suspect anything
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wrong, get an x-ray of the hip and they have arthritis. And it's quite a shocking development
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because you don't know. You don't necessarily know. And for folks just listening, the plain x-ray
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is a good enough tool for that diagnosis because you'll see the absence or thinning of cartilage
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where you should see it as in that diagram there. Yes. For arthritis that becomes symptomatic,
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we can usually see that. There obviously is a spectrum where the process starts to happen
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before we're even clinically aware of it. And I think that's the future. That's the trick is to
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find out before someone has clinical arthritis, do we know about it and what can we do to avoid it?
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And I also think it's important to really discuss what arthritis is because I know just from my own
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patients, I say you have arthritis and there's a lot of conversation of what, what actually does
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that mean? The surfaces, the ends of all long bones have cartilage at the end. It's a layer,
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it's a very smooth layer. And the only reason joints move pain-free without friction is because of that
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cartilage. The coefficient of friction of cartilage is so smooth, it's smoother than ice on ice. There's no
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man-made substance. I mean, it's smoother than Teflon and it's a biologic substance. It's constantly
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remodeling, albeit slow. It is a biologic tissue that can adjust to the pressures. So part of arthritis
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is the loss of that cartilage. The cartilage starts to thin. The chondrocytes, which are the main cellular,
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is the cell of cartilage. Its job is to create proteins to make the extracellular matrix so that
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it remains healthy. But chondrocytes, the cartilage itself is avascular. It gets its nutrition through
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diffusion from joints and they're not very efficient at making the extracellular matrix, which is imperative.
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So if there is overload of the cartilage, the chondrocytes will respond. And sometimes they die.
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Sometimes they go into senescence. And cartilage, if you take the knee, for example, 2% of the cartilage
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is chondrocytes. They don't have a lot of leeway when the load is substantial.
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So when a person comes to your office and they're complaining of hip pain, what is the most, I don't know,
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called the three most likely sources of that pain. We'll go through some of the examinations so people
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can sort of see how you will go about gathering that information. But what would be the top three
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most common diagnoses you'll encounter for a person with hip pain? And let's maybe bracket this by saying
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a person under 50. So, you know, if someone comes in with hip pain, right away, I'm sort of thinking
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about the different layers of the hip. So in my mind, I'm thinking, is this a bone problem?
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Is it a bone cartilage problem? Is it a connective tissue problem that is a ligament problem?
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Is the capsule too loose? The ball is held in the socket by a capsular layer. Is it a muscle and
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tendon problem? So we sort of, from deep to superficial, we have bone cartilage, and then we have connective
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tissue, ligaments, capsule, and then we have muscle tendon. And then we also have to recognize that
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sometimes hip pain is referred pain. That is, it could be coming from your back. So we're thinking
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about those separate layers. And then we're also thinking about location. So someone who has pain in
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the front of the knee, sorry, the front of the hip is different than someone side of the hip, back of
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the hip. So we need to tease all those factors out. So someone under the age of 50 would not necessarily
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be thinking about arthritis, but it obviously is always on your mind. Finding out a clue to what the
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diagnosis often depends on when it hurts, where it hurts, and what their activity is. So for example,
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you know, I think about patients that come in, they say, you know, we have the endurance athlete,
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we have the power athlete, we have... The non-athlete, presumably. The non-athlete, the individual who is
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flexible, gymnasts, ballet dancers, they sort of have different patterns of hip problems. If we start with
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the endurance athlete, let's start there. Endurance athletes is when we start deep down in the joint,
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the first thing we have to rule out is that this is not a stress fracture. Stress fractures can happen
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in a lot of different areas in the lower extremity, and we separate them out as to high-risk stress
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fractures and low-risk stress fractures. Risk of bad consequence if not treated? Correct. So
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if someone comes in and they have a marathon coming up and they say, my hip hurts, we have to make sure
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that this is not a stress fracture. Femoral neck stress fractures, and just... This is the femoral
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neck. So this here, you can have a stress fracture right in that area. And it usually just starts as a
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little... So just differentiate a stress fracture from a fracture. Sure. So a stress fracture is something
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that occurs slowly. So a stress fracture, at baseline, potentially normal bone with a substantial
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load to that bone that is in excess of what the normal healing capacity is of that bone. That is,
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bone constantly remodels. Every time we put stress on it, the microarchitecture is changing. There's
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small, tiny micro fractures that occur from normal weight bearing. The body is very capable of adjusting
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to that load and making new bone. When you start exercising or working out or running, the bone
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will get stronger based on the stresses that that bone sees. So for runners, for example, if you are
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training properly, there's no reason to expect that that bone can't adjust to the increased load that
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it's seeing. But oftentimes, due to overtraining, where you're not giving that bone enough of a chance
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to heal, you develop these tiny little micro fractures that aren't given enough time to then
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heal. And then it gets compounded when you go run the next day and the next day. And you're increasing
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not only the number of times that you run, but you're increasing the distance and the speed all at the
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same time. You get groin pain because that's where stress fractures of the femoral neck hurt. Right away,
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we know we need to rule it out. And they tend to occur in the femoral neck. And we have two locations.
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Either this is called the compression side, and this is called the tension side of the neck.
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And tension sided fractures, where you get a little crack in the bone here,
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are much more severe than compression side. But the bottom line is that we need to know that this exists.
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And the patient will feel groin pain, which is otherwise difficult for them to differentiate. I mean,
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they're not going to come in and say, my femoral neck hurts. Correct. What is the actual feeling?
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Does it feel akin to what you would feel if you pulled a muscle in your groin?
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It does, except it's very weight-bearing dependent. So most people come and say,
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I think I tore a muscle. I think I have a muscle strain. I don't see a lot of muscle strains in runners
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without an injury. You run, you're training, you're not necessarily going to get an acute injury like
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that. So sort of the presentation is slightly different. But it hurts in the groin. And right
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away, you don't let them run until you find out if it's a stress fracture. And here's why.
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It is. So x-rays, we always need to get x-rays to make sure you're making sure that the joint
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looks healthy. There are other conditions that can cause groin pain. But it's usually negative.
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It's usually hard to detect a stress fracture right when the pain starts. The MRI is the gold
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standard to see that. It used to be bone scan, but that is impractical. And an MRI really is
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excellent at looking. Because you can see the architecture of the bone, and you can see
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basically what we call edema in the bone, or bone marrow lesion, and sometimes a crack in the bone.
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And it's graded. There's stress reactions, and then there's stress fracture. A stress reaction is
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like a pre-stress fracture. And the reason why it's a high-risk stress fracture as opposed to a low
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risk is if it becomes a complete fracture, which was the other part of your question, what's a
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complete fracture? It's where this completely separates from the ball. And that's very important
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in this area because the blood supply to the head comes from this direction. So all of the nutrients
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that the ball sees comes from this direction. If this breaks and the blood supply is disrupted,
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and that's not corrected quickly, then the bone in that area no longer has blood supply. It will die
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and can't support the cartilage anymore. The cartilage will collapse, and you get AVN of the head,
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and that is a hip replacement, which is obviously difficult for anybody, but for someone who's
00:18:09.820
So the treatment for this when you make the diagnosis is rest?
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Is rest, typically. So if it's on the compression side, this is the compression side,
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you can go on crutches until you start to have no pain with weight-bearing. Once you have no pain
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with weight-bearing, you can continue along that path. It takes six to eight weeks to heal,
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and then you can slowly start up your exercises to regain some of your endurance, physical therapy,
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etc. And oftentimes, I'll get a follow-up MRI to make sure that it is healing and not increasing.
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If the stress fracture is on the tension side, the other, because you can imagine if it starts to
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crack on this side and the whole weight of your body is coming down this way, it can more likely
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displace mechanically. That often will need to get surgery, which is to put pins in. We will often
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just put three pins from here to here into the femoral head, and it will heal, and they heal
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quickly. And oftentimes, you can let that individual bear weight sooner than you.
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So paradoxically, the riskier stress fracture usually has the quicker recovery because they
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go to surgery as opposed to the tension-sided stress fracture. You can often end up getting,
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walking around doing what you need to do in your normal life, too. I've had patients with
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compression-sided stress fractures who are having so much difficulty with just their getting onto the
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subway, getting to work with the crutches. They wanted to have the surgery so that they can do that.
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Are there any differences in hip injuries between men and women? I mean, one thing that stands out to me,
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just having taken care of a number of patients, is, again, at least in the under 50 population,
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it seems that far more female patients of mine have had hip issues than male patients.
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I've had a number of females who have had hip resurfacing, labral repairs. Again, these are all
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young women, so they're typically in their 40s. Is that just a small number issue, and that's actually not
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a disproportionate finding? Or do women, based on the anatomy of their pelvis, are they more susceptible
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to labral tears or other types of injuries in the hip? There are different patterns. There are certain
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conditions of ligamentous laxity that are more prevalent in women, developmental dysplasia is more
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prevalent in women, and so sometimes that sometimes is the inciting issue. There are other types of hip
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problems that are more prevalent in men. There's a condition that we often have to treat that has
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implications to a lot of the structures around the hip. It's called femoral acetabular impingement.
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Femoral acetabular impingement is, we think, at least the prevailing theory is, let me tell
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you what it is first. Basically, on the neck, right around here, it's actually sort of in the front,
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a bump develops. If I look at the model, a model here of the femoral neck, and there's sort of one
00:21:06.240
here, and this is typically the location of it, and I'll just color it, you get a prominent bump
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of bone. So this area, it's called the cam lesion, and what happens is it changes the shape at the head
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and neck junction, so it's not really spherical. It's sort of this oblong shape, so that when it goes
00:21:29.760
into the acetabulum, it can pinch on the acetabular rim. And on the acetabular rim is not only the cartilage,
00:21:41.180
but the labrum. Let me show a picture. So if we open up the hip, and we look inside,
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again, here's the cartilage, this blue hue, and this lining is called the labrum.
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So if the ball is no longer spherical, but oblong, the cam lesion will pinch on the labrum,
00:22:02.380
and the labrum will tear, and will injure the cartilage that is connected to that area.
00:22:07.120
So how does this happen? We think it happens because the growth plate, which closes in males,
00:22:15.200
late teens, slightly earlier in females, because of repetitive stress from certain sporting activities,
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hockey, football, basketball, if there's impingement because of those high-stress sports,
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that growth plate will have a delayed closure. And it will close later, and a new bone will form in that area.
00:22:38.040
And that's important because one of the risks of FAI that continues is you can get arthritis,
00:22:45.960
because if the cartilage is being injured, then it increases the risk of meeting a procedure later in life.
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That's more common in men, FAI. It's certainly prevalent in women too, not as. Sometimes it's different sports,
00:22:59.760
but I think it's because the growth plate closes a little earlier in women that it may not be as much of an issue.
00:23:07.120
It also may be the type of sport. The power-type sport, where there's a lot of ground reaction force when you land,
00:23:16.020
Now, in the shoulder, the labrum creates effectively the socket. So, if you have a person who's never had
00:23:24.700
a subluxation of their shoulder, that labrum is creating kind of a vacuum around the glenoid head.
00:23:32.300
This seems to be a much more stable ball and socket than the shoulder.
00:23:36.880
What is the role of the labrum in stabilizing that joint? I can understand how asymmetries can cause arthritis,
00:23:44.220
but just in terms of pure stability, you don't really hear about dislocations of the hip very often.
00:23:50.360
Obviously, the most famous example I can think of is Bo Jackson, which maybe we can talk about that case a bit.
00:23:55.440
But what is it that the labrum is doing from a stability standpoint,
00:23:59.140
or is it simply just providing a clean and neutral articulating surface for the cartilage?
00:24:05.680
It also helps to create a seal around the ball. So, it is a sort of a suction effect too.
00:24:11.800
And it's very similar to the shoulder. We have dynamic stabilizers in the hip.
00:24:16.140
It becomes more of a concern when the hip isn't formed normally.
00:24:21.320
Because then that acetabulum becomes flatter, which actually mimics the shoulder a little bit in terms of lack of stability.
00:24:27.920
Correct. And some of those patients who have instability of the hip because maybe they have some dysplasia,
00:24:34.980
so the ball never really is in the hip, they have greater motion.
00:24:38.080
I mean, ballet dancers would be a perfect example of that.
00:24:42.060
That's right. And some of those individuals who actually have a hypertrophic labrum,
00:24:45.940
it actually gets bigger because it's being asked to do more.
00:24:50.340
There's also, I mean, you can see in the picture here, there's a ligamentum teres.
00:24:54.100
I don't know if you remember that from medical school.
00:25:00.940
It provides some blood supply early on in life, and then later on doesn't really provide much blood.
00:25:06.920
But for people who are unstable, this provides a secondary restraint because the ligament connects the ball to the socket.
00:25:16.180
So one thing we need to be aware of whenever you're operating on the hip is to leave that alone in individuals who are unstable
00:25:22.100
because it's providing a bit of stability to that area.
00:25:25.040
Got it. Is this a good diagram to show how you do a total hip replacement or a hip resurfacing or explain what some of those procedures look like?
00:25:34.380
Sure. So in a hip replacement, basically you're taking off the neck.
00:25:39.780
You're inserting a metal stem down the shaft of the proximal femur.
00:25:44.440
And then in this area, you're putting a metal cup in that region.
00:25:48.480
And then there's different ways to do this, but the metal cup then has a plastic liner on the inside.
00:25:54.120
And is that still made out of ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene?
00:25:59.400
That's amazing. That's what they were doing 25 years ago.
00:26:03.440
Why has that operation become so tolerable compared to the version of that operation I saw in medical school?
00:26:12.060
Today, it's an outpatient surgery. The people go home. They seem to recover so well.
00:26:18.100
People used to be debilitated by that operation 30 years ago.
00:26:24.580
And honestly, in every aspect of the surgery, technology has helped us.
00:26:30.500
So back when I was training as a resident, almost all of the hip replacements were done through a posterior approach, an approach through the back muscles.
00:26:43.340
Right. And now you go anteriorly. Now I don't perform, it's not one of the surgeries that I perform hip replacements, but it's much easier to spare the muscle and the ligaments when you do an anterior approach that is an approach from the front.
00:26:56.500
So you're saying less of the morbidity is due to less muscular damage on the approach?
00:27:03.860
Also, just the way we medically manage patients around the surgery.
00:27:11.000
And so the whole process has become much more efficient and safer, to be honest.
00:27:17.660
And a resurfacing leaves the femoral head intact and only addresses the acetabulum?
00:27:26.260
And I don't do this. I'm not going to speak to the different intricacies of that.
00:27:30.940
But there are ways to preserve the amount of bone that you're taking if the individual is young.
00:27:37.260
I think that's done less now, actually, lately.
00:27:40.520
So we talked a little bit about what are kind of the problems that people will show up with when they're young.
00:27:45.880
When people are seeing an orthopedic surgeon north of 60, 65, I'm guessing it's arthritis and fracture that would be the dominant injuries.
00:27:57.000
Is there anything else that's showing up as significant?
00:27:59.180
In addition to those problems, we also see muscle and tendon problems.
00:28:04.040
In particular, we see issues with the tendons on the side of the hip.
00:28:08.420
And this is actually not just in older individuals, but all individuals.
00:28:12.560
The main abductor of the hip is the gluteus medius, which you can see coming out.
00:28:18.540
It sits on the back of the pelvis and attaches at the edge on the lateral or the outsides of the femur.
00:28:34.180
The glute max comes across here and attaches a little bit lower down on the femur.
00:28:43.200
In fact, we consider this to be the rotator cuff of the hip.
00:28:53.780
And just as in the rotator cuff, it starts to degenerate after a certain age.
00:29:01.380
Weakness of the gluteus medius is very difficult because it's incredibly painful.
00:29:10.020
We also see this in endurance athletes as well from the repetitive stress.
00:29:13.540
And we also see this in unstable patients because those muscles are trying to dynamically keep the ball in the socket.
00:29:24.340
Ballet dancers in particular have incredibly large gluteus medius minimus powerful.
00:29:29.440
Part of the reason is because they're asked to do a lot to stabilize the hip.
00:29:36.440
And we often approach that just like a rotator cuff.
00:29:39.420
So are most of the injuries you see here underuse or overuse?
00:29:46.160
So the older we get, it doesn't necessarily matter whether it's overuse or underuse.
00:29:51.460
These things will happen because that is just the normal trajectory of tendon problems, tendon pathology.
00:30:00.680
The tendon cells over time start to degenerate just like all of our cells.
00:30:06.340
And they go through process of senescence like all tissue.
00:30:11.000
And those senescent cells produce those factors that lead to degeneration of the tendon, causes inflammation, incredible amount of pain.
00:30:26.160
Now, if you knew it was happening before it started, would you be able to do anything?
00:30:31.480
We don't have that ability yet, but that's what we're trying to figure out, how to intervene before these injuries take place.
00:30:40.340
There's two things that jump into my mind here.
00:30:42.700
The first is the obvious need for, I hate to use the word physical therapy because that really gets misconstrued a lot,
00:30:50.300
but basically deliberate exercise that strengthens those muscles.
00:30:54.580
When I used to be a cyclist, one of the challenges of that versus any sport truly is you're sort of in one plane, one dimension, right?
00:31:02.200
So you get very, very strong quads, glutes, and hams.
00:31:11.040
You're not really doing any abduction of the hip.
00:31:14.520
And as such, you get a very tight tensor fasciae latae.
00:31:17.520
A lot of cyclists get really bad IT band pain because they just lack that strength there.
00:31:22.760
And so an obvious way to fix this, which I was very lucky that I was able to fix this non-surgically
00:31:28.220
because I was having debilitating IT band pain, was simply doing a lot of strengthening for the abductors.
00:31:37.080
So that at least suggested to me that you could be preventive in some way.
00:31:42.020
If I had any muscle that needed to be worked on and I had to pick one muscle group, it would be that muscle group,
00:31:50.180
It is implicated in so many lower extremity injuries at the hip and the knee.
00:31:55.840
A weak gluteus medius, weak abductors can cause a lot of injury.
00:32:01.160
And I do believe that the stronger they are, it's almost like bones.
00:32:15.840
And so the stronger and healthier the tendon is at a starting point, this is sort of how I think about this.
00:32:23.640
First of all, not only are you likely to have less injury, and I'm talking about ACL injuries too.
00:32:32.540
Everything that we're going to talk about in the knee.
00:32:35.420
Hip fractures, which we started to talk about a little in the elderly, that too.
00:32:43.520
There was a study done out of South Korea that looked...
00:32:46.500
It was an imperfect study, but it was pretty decent.
00:32:51.460
It was retrospectively evaluated, but they took CAT scans of people who were in for a hip fracture,
00:33:00.720
And they measured the volume of their psoas muscles.
00:33:05.640
So this is the psoas muscle, and this is the iliacus.
00:33:09.180
Together they make the iliopsoas muscle attaches here.
00:33:16.120
So if you stumble, you pick your leg up to save yourself.
00:33:19.240
Now, the volume of that muscle was significantly smaller than that of an aged matched control
00:33:27.900
group who were getting CAT scans for other reasons.
00:33:31.760
Now, we don't know why they were getting CAT scans.
00:33:33.960
So that's, you know, it's a little bit confounding.
00:33:36.340
But it showed that there was a significant decrease in volume in those patients who have
00:33:41.520
So we know that hip muscle strength, so they're important to get the abductor strong, the hip
00:33:48.140
The problem with the hip flexors is that we're always sitting.
00:33:51.460
Even if they're strong, they're often tight because we're always in this position.
00:33:55.720
So it's important to see how your hip flexors are, make sure that they're flexible because
00:34:00.940
an imbalance in the flexibility of that muscle group will also impact the antagonistic muscles
00:34:07.660
in the back, the gluteus maximus, which extend the hip, and the hamstrings, which also extend
00:34:16.660
But if I could work on anything to help prevent these things later, I think this is a good
00:34:22.780
The other thing that I've really migrated to over the past decade as I've become very obsessed
00:34:27.720
with all of these muscles, in particular, those hip adductors, is the importance of training
00:34:34.460
them, not just in concentric phase, but also eccentrically.
00:34:38.740
So there are these exercises we do in a training, I don't know, for lack of a better word, philosophy,
00:34:54.740
So if I'm on my right side, you know, my right elbow is down.
00:34:57.620
It's sort of like a plank, but you're on the knee, and your hips are up, and you're
00:35:03.180
extending yourself forward as you're putting the hip back.
00:35:06.960
So you are eccentrically loading the adductor as you go back, and then you're concentrically
00:35:17.600
Now, for anybody who's done this, we've demonstrated these things in other exercise videos.
00:35:21.760
I mean, five reps of this slowly, you feel like someone is jamming an ice pick into those
00:35:30.420
It is remarkable how difficult it is, but you don't need to do a lot.
00:35:35.040
Just doing a little bit of that stuff every day does so much in terms of lower body maintenance.
00:35:41.840
And looking at this picture, I think it's pretty clear why.
00:35:44.540
It's such small muscles that have such an unfavorable angle at their attachment, right?
00:35:52.340
In terms of like the contraction, you know, it has such an unfavorable lever arm for what
00:36:04.000
Put aside just, you know, the 25-year-old skiing accident, freak accident, you know, you're
00:36:10.280
But let's talk about the more predictable and far more catastrophic fractures to quality
00:36:15.400
of life, which are these fractures of the femoral neck that are occurring in people due
00:36:22.040
Now, I talk about these stats all the time and nobody believes them because they're so
00:36:26.560
But if you're 65 or older and you fracture that hip, depending on the study, 15 to 30% one-year
00:36:38.000
How do these people present to you and why is it so challenging to take care of that fracture?
00:36:42.560
A large percentage of those people, it's usually another disease that has overtaken their lives.
00:37:00.760
The hospitalization alone is just catastrophic.
00:37:04.040
And so, and it's very hard to, when you're elderly and if you don't, first of all, you
00:37:09.600
break your hip, you come to the hospital, there has to be some medical management to make sure
00:37:16.680
And everybody who has a hip fracture needs surgery.
00:37:21.320
It would be essentially a death sentence to do so because the goal is to mobilize as quickly
00:37:29.760
Because for even the people who don't have, you know, the mortality of 20 to 30% within
00:37:35.520
the first year, you know, that's been a stable number for decades.
00:37:40.340
I mean, every time they look at it, that's a stable number and that's within one year.
00:37:47.760
It's pulmonary emboli, fat emboli, MI because of surgery versus, you know, two weeks out,
00:37:56.020
they're okay, but then they fail to thrive and they die within the year.
00:38:02.700
The management of these patients is very important early on.
00:38:05.880
So we'd like to get a full team on board, right?
00:38:11.820
You need a team approach because you need them medically optimized.
00:38:15.680
Before surgery so that they could safely go through the surgery.
00:38:18.500
How long can they take to get tuned up before surgery?
00:38:25.940
Before we had the medical management sort of model of hip fractures, you oftentimes were
00:38:35.800
An orthopedist comes in and say, let's just do this right now.
00:38:41.640
So when we have sort of the team approach, the medical doctors are like, listen, we have
00:38:56.380
It has, at least in the studies that I've seen, people are able to get discharged sooner,
00:39:07.820
And part of the issue is, first of all, obviously you broke your hips.
00:39:14.440
The first day you come in, they won't, no one will feed you anything, right?
00:39:19.020
And then in bed for two days, we're having surgery.
00:39:24.760
And then even for the people who don't pass away, who don't die, there's a decrease.
00:39:32.540
So if you were using a cane before, you're using a walker.
00:39:36.380
If you're using a walker before, you're now in a wheelchair.
00:39:39.260
If you were walking normally, you might be using a cane.
00:39:41.540
So there's a 50% of people that go down a level in performance.
00:39:45.140
I once had a patient who was early on in my career.
00:39:48.640
I was a junior attending and a resident calls me and says to me,
00:39:52.820
we have a patient with a femoral neck fracture.
00:39:58.360
He was riding on the West Side Highway and he crashed and he broke his femoral neck.
00:40:05.500
I said, just go consent him for the surgery in which the resident was a junior resident.
00:40:09.680
He goes and talks to the patient about all the risks and benefits of the surgery.
00:40:13.340
I go in to see the patient and he's got this...
00:40:16.160
Obviously, I expect him to be miserable, but he really was like...
00:40:20.480
He said to me, he says, your resident just told me I have a 30% chance of dying this year.
00:40:32.940
As you were talking earlier about the degeneration of the hip,
00:40:37.140
obviously the first thing that comes to my mind,
00:40:39.100
and I'm sure everybody's mind listening to this is,
00:40:43.960
Now, we're going to talk about stem cells through all of these joints,
00:40:49.960
When I hear that the tendons of those muscles and those muscles themselves are going to weaken,
00:40:56.420
when I hear that my cartilage is going to weaken,
00:41:00.380
when I hear that the osseous structure of the bone is going to weaken,
00:41:04.540
all of these things make me wish I could just have newer and younger cells there.
00:41:10.020
So what do we know about the utility of stem cell therapy here?
00:41:17.160
This is a great conversation, and there's a lot of layers to this conversation
00:41:21.440
because there's the dark side and the bright side of this.
00:41:25.660
When we talk about orthobiologics or biologics in general,
00:41:29.880
basically biologics, it's a class of therapies that are using
00:41:38.800
So you're using a biologic product to encourage healing of diseased or injured tissue.
00:41:45.560
So the most commonly used ones are blood, specifically platelets,
00:41:52.300
bone marrow, bone marrow aspirate concentrate is called, and also fat.
00:41:57.560
So if we sort of go through those three, just to start there,
00:42:06.820
We take your blood, we draw it, and we take it down the hall,
00:42:13.460
And the centrifuge machine will separate out the different elements of the blood
00:42:20.880
So after you're done spinning it, you have a layer called the plasma layer,
00:42:28.380
And it separates out the red blood cells and a lot of the white blood cells.
00:42:37.860
You can spin it so that you're keeping some of the white blood cells.
00:42:42.360
So we've categorized it into leukocyte-rich PRP and leukocyte-poor PRP.
00:42:48.700
And this is a very simplified way that we think about it right now.
00:42:52.120
And there's certainly, if we fast forward 10 years from now,
00:42:57.800
Because we just are sort of in our infancy of understanding what we're doing here.
00:43:02.900
So the principle is we take those platelets, which are involved in healing.
00:43:11.040
the first thing that happens is the platelets come to the surface
00:43:13.900
to form a blood clot and to form a scar, and then you heal.
00:43:18.100
So platelets are associated with an incredible amount of growth factors
00:43:22.400
and healing factors, including the 800 to 1,000 proteins within the plasma.
00:43:27.760
And you inject that into tendon, a joint with arthritis, muscle, and see what happens.
00:43:36.960
The problem is that as a physician, you are allowed to do that procedure.
00:43:43.000
There's no rule that can't say that anybody comes in and they say,
00:43:54.120
What does the actual science say about what's actually working?
00:43:58.160
And what we've learned is that it works for some things pretty decently
00:44:05.880
And we can only go by our randomized controlled trials
00:44:09.340
and systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials
00:44:18.340
There's good data to suggest, like tier one data,
00:44:20.660
maybe tier two data that suggests that it works for tennis elbow.
00:44:23.980
It works pretty decently for gluteus medius tears.
00:44:30.920
Some will argue maybe in the hamstring tendon it works, but I'm not convinced.
00:44:35.140
And just to be sure, are you talking specifically about PRP
00:44:38.200
or are you talking about the broader umbrella of stem cells?
00:44:41.720
The broader umbrella of stem cells don't seem to work.
00:44:46.440
And I think it's important to bring up a very important part,
00:44:51.680
And I think that's one of the major problems is that there is no stem cell therapy anywhere.
00:44:58.820
When you go to Mexico and get stem cell therapy, what are you actually getting?
00:45:06.900
I mean, I can only speak what's happening in the United States,
00:45:09.720
but the only stem cell therapies approved in the United States are for blood disorders, blood diseases.
00:45:17.180
In fact, the FDA has a big warning page with a video that explains there are no stem cells.
00:45:24.140
Stem cells implies that I'm going to inject cells into you,
00:45:31.300
They have the ability to become something else,
00:45:33.880
and those cells are now going to become your cartilage.
00:45:41.280
In fact, right now, what seems to be happening...
00:45:45.520
In other words, what is the signature that allows that doctor to know
00:45:53.020
Because these are not autologous typically at these clinics, right?
00:45:58.780
I only say that because everybody I know is basically going abroad.
00:46:02.580
Although I know some people that have done this here.
00:46:04.380
You know, they tear the rotator cuff, you know,
00:46:08.540
and six months later, the rotator cuff is fine without surgery.
00:46:12.060
So, first of all, it's illegal to actually give stem cells.
00:46:17.480
So, a few years ago, people were able to get products
00:46:39.980
The FDA will not let you inject this into anybody.
00:46:46.100
The FDA has a division that regulates the use of human cells,
00:46:54.580
You can use your own as long as it's not manipulated
00:47:05.160
So, you can take your bone marrow out of the pelvis,
00:47:08.960
and we get it from the pelvis, and you can concentrate that.
00:47:20.840
Now, with fat, because fat has actually shown some promise
00:47:31.180
You can do that because you're minimally manipulating the fat.
00:47:36.680
You are taking it and making it into smaller fat particles,
00:47:40.320
but you are not essentially altering the fat itself.
00:47:44.980
I mean, you're basically breaking down adipose tissue
00:47:53.060
And the idea is that micronized fat regrows as cartilage?
00:47:58.780
So right now, our best understanding of biologics,
00:48:07.300
And it's a good symptom-modifying treatment when it works
00:48:28.340
Maybe take some COX-2 inhibitor anti-inflammatories
00:48:34.020
We don't have the repertoire of what I prescribe
00:48:37.540
Yeah, the non-surgical treatment for these things
00:48:40.440
So here's an opportunity with the ortho-biologic field
00:48:51.600
as long as you're not injecting over and over again.
00:48:55.200
There's a space for this that is very reasonable.
00:49:00.320
it works for knee arthritis probably better than anything.
00:49:10.220
Why don't we have RCTs that can answer these questions definitively?
00:49:15.380
Because there are a few things that I discuss with people in medicine
00:49:18.800
that create more sort of polarization around treatment
00:49:32.600
I couldn't move my arm and in six months I was fine.
00:49:35.000
Of course, we always fail to have the counterfactual here,
00:49:37.060
which is it's possible your arm was just going to get better on its own.
00:49:40.740
It's possible that the initial MRI showed something,
00:49:45.720
or it just healed on its own because it was going to heal on its own.
00:49:48.000
So, you know, the only way you can ever escape that
00:49:58.680
a number of those patients are going to get better.
00:50:20.340
Of all the data, that's the tier one best data.
00:50:25.100
because it doesn't seem to work well in hip arthritis.
00:50:28.260
Is it just possible that the studies haven't been done correctly?
00:50:31.320
And I think this brings up a very important point.
00:50:35.880
let's say for a medicine, a hypertensive medication,
00:50:40.720
And you're comparing it to some other treatment
00:50:46.340
I'm taking your platelets of unknown concentration.
00:50:54.740
Different machines concentrate those platelets differently.
00:51:05.180
I don't even know your disease process specifically.
00:51:25.040
which is like an association of associations internationally
00:51:28.560
where they've formed something called the BARB,
00:51:52.540
to the point where we can generate information?