Age no barrier
to active lifestyle
People today
want
and expect to live a full life well into their
retirement, and consultant orthopaedic surgeon Roger Tillman
and his team at Royal Orthopaedic Hospital are working hard to meet
those expectations. A specialist in hip and knee surgery,
Roger has worked at the hospital for more than ten years and says the
increasing number of operations is due to people’s increasing
longevity.
“We
have
an ageing population and those people rightly expect
to have the right to continue all kinds of activities,” he
says.
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“It
used
to be that 50 years ago people with arthritis
accepted that their lives would be limited by that but there is no need
for that now. Both hip and knee replacements are generally
successful.”
The
reason that hip and knee replacements are so common is because these
are the joints taking most of our body weight. Ankles can
also be
affected but replacement operations for ankles are
much more complicated than knees and hips.
And
each person will be affected in a different way.
“We have had cases of
people who have had both knees and both hips replaced,” says
Roger. “It
is more common to replace both knees than both hips. It is generally
the case that someone will be experiencing agonising pain in one hip
and maybe just the odd twinge in the other. And that is
despite the
fact they have done all their walking, sport and living on both legs
equally.
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“I
would say we do about 600 hip and knee replacements
each year and as this is a specialist centre we do many cases which are
straightforward but also many of the difficult cases from across the
whole of the Midlands
“The
majority of the people we see are
older but my youngest case was 26 and I have colleague who have
operated on people even younger than that.”
And although
it
may be a routine operation, Roger says it can be life-changing.
“We
have so many patients who tell us they were in terrible pain and now
they can get back onto the golf course or get on with their
lives,” he
says. “This is all about giving people back the
quality of life we
would all hope to enjoy.”
Birmingham
Evening
Mail
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
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