Orthopedics This Week | February 16, 2016 | Page 11

ORTHOPEDICS THIS WEEK
VOLUME 12, ISSUE 6 | FEBRUARY 16, 2016

Dr. Roy Davidovitch, has performed the
anterior approach about 100 times.
Billie’s surgeon, Dr. Gavin Pittman, has
also performed about 100 anterior hip
arthroplasties.
According to The Wall Street Journal,
about 26% of U.S. surgeons can perform anterior approach.

posterior approach was superior, he
told them: “we don’t know which is the
best approach.”
At the first Brazilian Current Concepts
in Joint Repair meeting held in September 2014, Dr. William J. Maloney III,
M.D., of Stanford Hospital & Clinics
raised the following concerns regarding
the anterior approach:

After such highly optimistic articles like
The Wall Street Journal’s, more and more
surgeons will no doubt feel the pressure
to learn the anterior approach.

The Issues

“[With an anterior approach] it’s
difficult to visualize the femur, the
femoral cutaneous nerve often gets
injured, there’s radiation exposure
for both patient and surgeon, leg
length equalization is difficult if you
use the fracture table, and the learning curve is long.”

When The Wall Street Journal asked Dr.
Jay Lieberman, president of American
Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons
(AAHKS), whether the anterior or the

“Steve Wilson did a study in a community hospital where they introduced the anterior approach; five
surgeons compared this approach

It won’t be a smooth road.

11

to the standard length posterior
approach. They started the anterior approach mostly for marketing
reasons because they were getting
pressure from patients to do minimally invasive hip replacement and
to reduce their dislocation rates.
Four of the five surgeons went and
worked with Joel Matta to figure out
how to do the operation. They did
it Joel’s way; they used fluoroscopy
and used a fracture table.”
“This is what happens in a real
world community practice…not
at a high volume center where
people usually do studies. They
accomplished their goal, i.e., they
grew their volume. One surgeon’s
volume increased five times. They
increased the percentage of cementless fixation and they started using
larger heads—which is primarily
the reason for the reduced disloca-

Safe
and
effective
for treating lumbar spinal stenosis.
Five year data proves it.
T H E N E W S TA N D A R D O F C A R E I N
L U M B A R S P I N A L S T E N O S I S T R E AT M E N T

Data on file at Paradigm Spine, LLC.

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