Dr. Joshua John-Ram Schacter explains why joint replacements fail sooner than most people expect. Implants typically last 10-15 years, sometimes 20-25 in sedentary patients, and that timeline hasn't improved since the 1980s. High-impact activities like running and heavy backpacking speed up wear, which is why doing these surgeries on younger patients often leads to multiple revisions down the line.
Questions this video answers
About 10–15 years (the speaker has also seen some last 20–25 years in minimally active people).
Since the 1980s.
Chapters
We do see them wearing out 10 to 15 years. And it's a real concern.
To be perfectly honest, the longevity of joint replacements haven't really changed much since the 1980s. So, you know, 10 to 15 years or I've seen joints last 20 to 25, but I've seen them from the 80s. Like I've actually seen joints that, that long. These are in really minimally active people. If you have a very active person who is going to come in and have a joint replacement and wants to go back to doing an activity like weighted hiking, where we do a lot backpacking, or we're going to do running, hockey, impact sports, even multi, you know, like a lot of cycles, like if you're doing, if you're a big time cyclist, joint replacement is going to wear out with time. So we do see them wearing out 10 to 15 years and it's a real concern. Right. One of the biggest problems I see in modern orthopedics is that we're doing these surgeries in people who are younger and younger. And that means that we're going to be doing revision surgeries in people who are younger and younger. And I have a lot of reasons why I don't think that's a good idea. From a metabolic perspective, as a functional medicine, I would say functional medicine fan and somebody who applies functional medicine in my practice, I don't want to see downstream problems. Right. We have so many downstream problems from things that we're doing now. You know, if we're doing surgery on people in their 40s with joint replacement, that's really hard to take back.
