Gender-specific knee surgery?
Gender-specific knee surgery?
When I first heard it, I thought it was a joke: “Gender-specific knee surgery.” I mean, I knew boys and girls were different, but knees weren’t one of the parts my mom taught me!
Turns out, we’re more different than we thought (well, at least than I thought).
About two-thirds of all knee replacement procedures are performed on women, but doctors have simply been giving us smaller-sized knee replacements that were originally designed for men.
That oversight was corrected last year when Zimmer (an orthopaedic surgical product manufacturer in Indiana) introduced the Gender Solutions(tm) High-Flex Knee, which is touted to be “the first and only knee replacement shaped to fit a woman’s anatomy.”
According to the Zimmer sales pitch, the new gender-specific knee has a thinner profile (the bone at the front of a man’s knee is more prominent), provides more natural movement (the Zimmer knee accounts for an angle between the hip and the knee that’s different in men and women), and has a contoured shape (which provides a better fit in the narrower anatomy of a woman’s knee).
As you might expect, this new knee costs more. The Zimmer web site states: “There is approximately a 5% price difference compared to traditional knee replacement implants.”
Right now there’s not enough information available to tell if this is just another way to separate patients from their money, or if this really is a breakthrough for women whose original knees won’t go the distance.
