Total arthroplasty is basically a surgery at our orthopedic hospitals in Hyderabad performed for severe arthritis of the knee joint when there is complete damage to the card complete loss of cartilage resulting in severe pain and difficulty in their day-to-day activities.
If you look at your normal knee your joint the ends of the bones are covered with cartilage the cartilage is a white vascular structure it does not have a blood supply, it does not have now supply so it is painless and it is very smooth frictionless so you don’t feel any friction or stiffness or pain in the joint. But eventually when the cartilage wears off your knee becomes very very painful it becomes very stiff swollen and your day to day function becomes very very difficult so in this situation what is done is we remove any remaining damaged cartilage and shape the ends of the bone to such that our orthopedic surgeons are able to fix an artificial process.
The ends of the bone are shaped using special instrumentation to accept a prosthetic joint, these prosthetic joints are made with special alloys or are a mixture of metals the various combinations of these so they come in different parts and different sizes and there are many good companies good products which are made which have been used for the last 20 30 years and with very very highly successful results so the worn-out cartilage or damaged cartilage is removed and then an artificial or prosthetic giant is fixed to the end of the bone using something called bone cement which is acts as a ground. Once this is fixed with bone cement this is completely fixed it doesn’t come off easily it doesn’t move at all so the same thing is done on the other side of the joint as well.
On the second part as well on the tibia so the bone is cut and shaped like that so to accept this and there is a central part called polyethylene insert which comes like this so two metal parts are fixed to the other end of the bone and then this goes in between so because now the articulation is between metal and the plastic again there will be no pain, no friction because the coefficient of friction between these two materials is very low and usually this will last very long so because there is no pain and no friction.
The patient again becomes very symptom-free, mobility becomes better and function becomes better. The third component of the total is something like this where we also have the knee cap we also have the knee caps sometimes we replace the two it is not always essential to replace this but in most of the patient, we do replace that.
The combination of the three parts that are being replaced is in usual terms two parts when they are replaced it is called total knee replacement surgery.
