Dr. Joshua John-Ram SchacterDr. Joshua Schacter, DO FAAOS, is America’s Holistic Orthopedic Surgeon, with nearly two decades of surgical expertise.

Exploring the Challenges of Knee Replacement Surgeries

24 Nov 2023 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:50

This YouTube talk (speaker A) discusses concerns about premature knee replacement surgeries in the U.S., estimating that roughly 25–35% of knee replacements may be performed too early and in joints that are not sufficiently arthritic. The speaker highlights the clinical dilemma after non-operative treatments fail and cites national scale numbers (about 3 million knee replacements per year) to argue that hundreds of thousands to around one million procedures may be avoidable.

Questions this video answers

Between 25% and 30% (speaker also references a 35% figure).

About 3 million per year.

Approximately 1 million unnecessary surgeries per year (35% of ~3 million).

Chapters

We know from a lot of studies that in the U.S. between 25 and 30%, I think this is probably a low number of patients, knee replacements are done prematurely and that prematurely means we're doing them too soon. We're doing them in joints that aren't arthritic enough. And. Yeah, and the question is, what do you do if you don't have an option for a patient? If a patient's been through the hamster wheel, Right. They've seen their primary care doctor, they've had steroid injections, they've had viscous supplementation, they've tried therapy, they've had a scope. What's next? That's the major problem in our orthopedic practice. Interesting. That's how we met. I'm just going to come back to that point. There's about 3 million knee replacement surgery done in the United States per year and going up every year. And think about it, if 35% of those are done prematurely, so you talk about a million unnecessary surgery that we could have prevented.