The Realities of Knee Replacement Surgery

DePuy Knee Lawsuit News

Ten percent of patients have severe complications with their DePuy knee replacement and find it difficult to accept

Friday, April 20, 2018 - Knee replacement patients are generally optimistic when electing to undergo invasive knee replacement surgery and expect thing will go as planned. The doctors usually tell them that in a high percentage of cases people are back at work and enjoying life as they knew it after a short period of physical therapy. Of the hundreds of thousands of knee replacement surgeries that are successful, however, approximately 10-15% experience complications. That means tens of thousands of people suffer additional medical expenses, lost income, and chronic pain due to a faulty knee replacement device or improper surgery.

It can be difficult for a person to accept that a failed knee replacement device can leave a person crippled for life. When chronic pain fails to go away the mobility a person once enjoyed fails to return, a patient is forced to accept that something terrible has happened. If after a period of time a patient experiences soreness or pain, fever, chills, muscle ache, reduced range of motion, stiffness, swelling or fluid in the knee that does not subside, it may be time to seek a second opinion from an orthopedist not associated with the first one to test to see what may have gone wrong. The knee joint is the largest in the body and is required to carry a person's full weight with every step therefore even the slightest miscalculation in the angle of the upper to lower leg can cause the artificial knee to fail.

When the recovery from knee replacement surgery fails to materialize, an expensive, painful, and dangerous revision surgery is usually required. A second surgery usually entails a lengthy period of time, perhaps over a year, being out of work and there is no guarantee that one will ever be able to do the work they had been doing in the past. A knee replacement patient suffering from a failed DePuy knee replacement device could find themselves disabled permanently, having to live on a meager disability income, and forced to spend the rest of their lives walking with the assistance of a cane. DePuy knee problems may impact hundreds of thousand Americans.

If you or a loved one has had the faulty DePuy knee replacement system implanted there are symptoms to look for that may indicate something is wrong. The first thing to look for is pain. The pain can be severe as the tibia or fibula can fracture when the lower leg below the knee is not properly aligned with the upper leg. A knee replacement patient should be generally pain-free one-year post-op. Swelling, redness, and stiffness are also indications that something is wrong. Moreover, DePuy knee patients can experience wobbliness and looseness that prevent a patient from ever trusting walking on the load-bearing joint.

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