No More ACL Surgery!?!?!

I'll be looking into this. Anyone know about this procedure?? The article describes my experience to a T. I've been skiing for 2 years now on a detached ACL, and I can tell you with 100% certainty it totally sucks azz.


http://www.theskichannel.com/news/20140508/new-technology-meaning-no-more-acl-surgery-for-skiers/

.   I’m not reading that shit...If you have a quality brace you can get away without it..if you wear it.  That said, if you don't get it done you are going to need knee replacement done at some point.  You’re probably going to even if you do get it replaced.
Hope that helps
Happy Friday

Is this what your going with this summer??  Fore

Great find Camp ! This looks very promising.

You should read it....not too many big words  .... I understood it


I hear ya, and you're right, knee replacement is in my future. I have a brace and wear it while skiing with no issue. Only problem is if snow isn't soft (which is a lot of the time around here) the vibration that travels into my knee friggin kills, which takes all the fun out of skiing.

Anyway, no knee anything in my near future, I'll get buy just fine for a few more years. I'm too busy golfing, riding, drinking and all the other stuff that goes along with it.

this has been the holy grail for all kind of injuries and illnesses but, i doubt this treatment has been proven. this article is nothing more than a sales pitch from the company. i want an MRI to show that the ACL has reconnected and then a laxity test to see if it holds. ACL surgery has been very effective and has been time tested. if you decide to forgo the surgery, be prepared to attain and then maintain maximum knee fitness for strength and overall fitness for dynamic balance, endurance, and strength. this is hard,year around work. if you don't do this, then be prepared for knee instability and worsening of knee leading to early joint replacement.

thanks for bursting my bubble

How exactly would injecting anything into your knee cause a detached ACL to grow and reattach in the correct place?  This is pure BS.  I have heard that stem cells might help repair meniscus though.

Snake oil salesman here.  And I bet it's mighty expensive.

My knee doc had done a study when he worked for Dr Steadman on instructors, patrollers and race coaches that tore their ACL.  The study found that unless you wanted to have to get a knee replacement at a young age you had to get the ACL fixed.

Sorry to burst you bubble campy.  You should be thinking of getting it done now so you can be ready to ski next season.  I was able to ski 6 months after surgery.

It definitely sounds a little bit snake oil.  I'd love to read the science behind this approach.  Ligaments have very little blood supply, so they're hard to heal.  And they're in a synovial fluid bath.  Last fall, I read about research on a new way to mend torn ACLs, but there was no magic solution.

I agree with others, that totally read like a pitch for snake oil.

Camp, get yer knee fixed. It is eight months out of your life, and if you time it right you won't miss much skiing.

I suffered a complete ACL tear and partial MCL tear in '05. At the time, the family doc's advice was this: you are over 40, the surgery is really invasive, you should try to live with it. OK, did some rehab and was skiing (carefully) three months later with a drug store knee brace. Eventually got the custom Donjoy Defiant brace and wore it religiously, gradually eliminating the brace for everything but skiing and, oddly, snowshoeing. There is a lot of hyperextension happening when snowshoeing, who knew?

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that my quality of life was suffering. The Donjoy was a pain in the butt. In the 08/09 ski season, I tweaked my knee a few times despite wearing the brace. I was losing confidence on the slopes. I went to see the doctor again. This time the story was different: well, the surgery is way better now, you should consider it. So I did, and, longer story short, negotiated a surgery date of April 1, 2010. I stopped skiing in late February of that season, after another tweak put the fear of surgery-cancelling injury into my head.

By June, I was riding a bike and skied with the brace in the 2010/11 season (ortho's suggestion). Ditched the brace after that and the knee is solid as a rock. My only complaint is that my hamstring never completely recovered from the "harvest" for the hammy graft. This may have been my fault for not continuing to rehab as diligently as I should have, once given the green light.

In any case, I don't even think about what my left knee can or cannot do anymore.

Get'er done

  I am 17 yrs post acl surgery and have had no problems skiing or doing any other activities till last spring. After I tore my acl in the 90"s ,using my own patellar graft ,I spent 4 days in the hospital and 20 wks out of work .Well worth it came back stonger than other acl. No ill effects for 16 yrs.
   Last summer ,when I went to therapy to rehab knee, the therapists wanted to see my scars, they couldn't believe the size of them. They  told me now  advancements have been great and now only tiny incisions are needed. Get surgery now and be ready for Greek in December.

I had the same surgery you did Gunny ....... 3 years ago

 4 months into my rehab I tore it again while riding a stationary bike, or at least that's when I think I did it ... hard to tell for sure. I just know that I wanted to puke when my knee slid out again.....all that time and money wasted

Havinig a hard time putting myself thru all that crap again....that said, my knee still slides out so obvi i need to have something done again, but it wont be for a while. Thinking of knee replacement rather than repair this time...eff it!

Campy - did they use patella/hamstring graft or a ligament from someone else?

I had my first ACL replacement done in 2001. I tore it skiing. I was living in WY at the time and had the surgery done in CO by a reputable doctor. They took my patella tendon and used that as a graft. All was well. I went through rehab and felt fine. Skied some the next couple years but not a ton. In 2005 I was running on a treadmill at the Y and all of a sudden my knee just gave out and I almost got shot right off the treadmill. I could tell my ACL wasn't torn, but it just felt "loose". By happenstance I ended up with one of the best doctors I have ever met. He was one of the top ortho doctors at NYU and had treated many pro athletes in NYC. Turns out my graft had "worn out". It wasn't torn, it had just lost elasticity (like stretching a rubber band too many times). He told me the only sure way to replace an ACL is to replace it with another ACL. He had been doing ortho surgeries for over 25 years and said he didn't recommend a graft. I had the second surgery done and now have "bob's" ligament in my knee. I've skied 20-50 days per year since 2006 and have never had any issues. I no longer wear a brace and don't really think about it. I can't imagine not having the surgery done. I know some people can go without it, but not me.

Its a long way back - especially when you have already been through it once, but personally I think its worth it.

That is a pretty extreme position for a knee doc.  Harvesting from patella or hamstring is the norm and pro athletes mostly get the patella.  Allographs from donors have other issues like tissue rejection and are more risky based on what my knee doc told me.  He did a fellowship at Steadman clinic in Vail and was the us team women's doc for several seasons so I'd say he is a good source of info.

I was lucky enough to have my ACL break off the bone not rupture in the middle.  I got a healing response procedure that reattached the existing ACL and tightens it up.  It's usually only done for pro athletes as it requires a tougher rehab to gain the extension back but you have your original ACL only tighter.   I was younger then and had to vow to hit the rehab hard and did 2000 miles on my road bike that summer.  Bode had this same surgery.  The ACL survived another fall where I tore my MCL only 2 years later.  Been good for 12 years now.

I was told that it takes a hamstring or patella tendon about a year to 18 months to really turn into a ACL.  Until then it's more prone to retearing so the idea that an allograph is better is true but in my mind the risk of rejection and having to get it fixed or worse side effects like getting dead far out weight the benefits.

Coach Z wrote

That is a pretty extreme position for a knee doc.  Harvesting from patella or hamstring is the norm and pro athletes mostly get the patella.  Allographs from donors have other issues like tissue rejection and are more risky based on what my knee doc told me.  He did a fellowship at Steadman clinic in Vail and was the us team women's doc for several seasons so I'd say he is a good source of info.

Here's my guy:

http://www.seaportortho.com/ourphysicians/ronaldmkrinick.html

Perhaps "never" was overstating it. I updated my statement as I can't speak for the good doctor and whether or not he has ever done a graft surgery. In fact I guess I would be surprised if he had never done one. He certainly wasn't a fan of using the graft method. He did explain the possibility of tissue rejection, but said with ligaments the likelihood is pretty low. I remember him saying that docs have been trying lots of different things over the past 25 years, but that in his opinion the best option was to replace a ligament with a ligament. Taking a graft introduces additional risk of infection and more recovery as you now have to rehab the ligament and whatever area the graft was taken from.

Not saying your doc is wrong. I just think mine is more right:)

Danzilla wrote

Campy - did they use patella/hamstring graft or a ligament from someone else?

I had my first ACL replacement done in 2001. I tore it skiing. I was living in WY at the time and had the surgery done in CO by a reputable doctor. They took my patella tendon and used that as a graft. All was well. I went through rehab and felt fine. Skied some the next couple years but not a ton. In 2005 I was running on a treadmill at the Y and all of a sudden my knee just gave out and I almost got shot right off the treadmill. I could tell my ACL wasn't torn, but it just felt "loose". By happenstance I ended up with one of the best doctors I have ever met. He was one of the top ortho doctors at NYU and had treated many pro athletes in NYC. Turns out my graft had "worn out". It wasn't torn, it had just lost elasticity (like stretching a rubber band too many times). He told me the only sure way to replace an ACL is to replace it with another ACL. He had been doing ortho surgeries for over 25 years and said he never used a graft. I had the second surgery done and now have "bob's" ligament in my knee. I've skied 20-50 days per year since 2006 and have never had any issues. I no longer wear a brace and don't really think about it. I can't imagine not having the surgery done. I know some people can go without it, but not me.

Its a long way back - especially when you have already been through it once, but personally I think its worth it.

My doc tried harvesting my hamstring but he couldn't get it. Apparently my leg would contract everytime he grabbed a hold of the thing so he couldn't get it out of my leg, so he ended up  using my patella. My doc was reutable too, he was part of the Syracuse Ortho Specialists (SOS) that SU uses for their atheletes. In fact, he did one of my buddies ACL surgerys with no issues. Geuss I'm the lucky one

Time will tell what I do. Ask 50 people and get 50 diff answers. I'm still leaning towards full knee replacement, but eventually will go with whatever my doc says will be the best.

You are not that far from the knee doc I used in Watertown

Dr Peter Vaneenaman

http://www.ncortho.com/index.html

He worked for the us ski team