Preventing Hip Surgery

If you have chronic hip or groin pain, you're probably looking for up-to-the minute information about how best to manage your hip condition. Lynda Huey and I are the authors of Heal Your Hips, and we have helped hundreds of patients reduce pain, increase mobility, and restore function in their hips. Joining together, we have provided hip patients with alternatives to hip surgery. The more we combine our innovations the more we believe we can either prevent hip surgery altogether or at the very least buy a patient time -- perhaps a decade or more before they would require surgery. We want to buy time if we can, because the future may hold more elegant solutions to hip problems. We may not even be doing hip implant surgery ten years from now.

If your doctor has said that you need hip surgery, STOP! The pool and land exercise programs in our book could reverse the downward spiral of your hip's function. You could also be a candidate for a minimally-invasive procedure that I've helped pioneer to help prevent major hip surgery.

Many patients come to me because their former doctors have flatly told them, "I'm the doctor, you're the patient." My answer is that for me there's nothing better than patients who participate in getting themselves well. I'm delighted when they bring along popular articles on health and fitness to discuss during office visits or when they choose books to take home from my library. More power to them! And when we talk about their hips I try to avoid jargon. I want to demystify their loss of mobility, their decreased strength and loss of function. I use examples, anecdotes, Xrays, quick drawings, and photographs as I encourage their understanding of the anatomy and physiology of a hip, that elegant piece of biological machinery.

"I love to operate," I say after listening to patients describe their pain. "But I'd rather we exhaust all conservative care to get you back to health."

Back to golf, tennis, running, skiing, pick-up basketball, beach volleyball, bicycling – so many of my patients have their return to sports as a goal. And back to construction work, driving a bus, managing a restaurant, repairing computers – these recent patients of mine have sought to regain strength and mobility for their jobs. Most of my diagnoses lead to treatment in a pool where those with arthritis, congenital hip problems, rheumatoid arthritis, and even more complicated hip problems become instant athletes and unhobbled workers as they walk, run, push, pull, bend, squat, lunge, jump, and lift themselves easily. Indeed they can practice all their moves in the glove of water that protects them from pain. Many people call us from around the country, and in fact some even fly in for pool sessions with Lynda and/or consultations or surgery with me.

If you could reduce your hip pain and return to normal activities of daily life, would you care that your Xray still looks as though you have a problem? That's the same question I've asked my patients over the years, and the answer is always NO! By entering the water and insisting on gentle movement from your painful hip, you can begin to regain strength, flexibility, and mobility while you gradually reduce your pain. I always insist that my hip patients attempt a legitimate three-month effort with Lynda Huey in the pool and on land to prevent hip surgery before considering the next step: hip arthroscopy.

My patented new microsurgical instruments the size of a pencil allow me to see around the corners inside the hip joint, view the inflammation, smooth down damaged cartilage, and replace corrosive joint fluid without the high cost in tissue damage that hip surgeries normally require. Then a window of opportunity can be presented to you: before the joint becomes inflamed again, you can exercise in water and on land to regain strength and function that can save you from needing major hip implant surgery.