Guest guest Posted June 22, 2004 Report Share Posted June 22, 2004 My fellow Americans (not meant for consumption by the rest of the folks on this group), for too long we have been misled by statistics. I seriously doubt that even when the long term results are in that show which prosthesis lasted longer on average, they will truly provide us within any meaningful yardstick against which to measure the quality of the different devices. Clear design defects will no doubt be easy to detect. If beads break off and migrate into the bone - Bingo! If they don't, then without some other clear indication of an identifiable condition such as AVN or femoral head fracture, no-one will really know whether one prosthesis is better than another. We know all about the plastic liner problem. It's history. There was a failure of materials. The design concept was good. It could be a matter of choosing more suitable patients, or surgical technique. How you control all the variables enough to come to a reliable conclusion about the figures you're looking at is way beyond the capabilities of my tiny brain, so I tend to luxuriate in my good fortune and the hell with the statistics. I think the real value of the opinions expressed here lies in our ability to support each other emotionally through the leap of faith we all took. The encouragement to future hippies is the other great benefit, and it cuts both ways. The statistics concerning the efficacy of one prosthesis or another seem to me to be a distraction more than a reliable guide to anything. The individual results are as different as we all are from one another. It's comforting to draw conclusions from numbers, but it's really an art, not a science, to make sense of it all. Therefore without demonstrable, significant failures of a particular design, I agree that there will be no clear " winner " . Des Tuck Bilateral BHR In a message dated 6/22/2004 8:29:49 PM Pacific Daylight Time, mdmcgr@yah oo.com writes: One possibility is that when all the results are in, there will be no clear " winner " of the different surface replacements. One way that could happen is that they mostly outlast our lifetimes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted June 22, 2004 Report Share Posted June 22, 2004 My fellow Americans (not meant for consumption by the rest of the folks on this group), for too long we have been misled by statistics. I seriously doubt that even when the long term results are in that show which prosthesis lasted longer on average, they will truly provide us within any meaningful yardstick against which to measure the quality of the different devices. Clear design defects will no doubt be easy to detect. If beads break off and migrate into the bone - Bingo! If they don't, then without some other clear indication of an identifiable condition such as AVN or femoral head fracture, no-one will really know whether one prosthesis is better than another. We know all about the plastic liner problem. It's history. There was a failure of materials. The design concept was good. It could be a matter of choosing more suitable patients, or surgical technique. How you control all the variables enough to come to a reliable conclusion about the figures you're looking at is way beyond the capabilities of my tiny brain, so I tend to luxuriate in my good fortune and the hell with the statistics. I think the real value of the opinions expressed here lies in our ability to support each other emotionally through the leap of faith we all took. The encouragement to future hippies is the other great benefit, and it cuts both ways. The statistics concerning the efficacy of one prosthesis or another seem to me to be a distraction more than a reliable guide to anything. The individual results are as different as we all are from one another. It's comforting to draw conclusions from numbers, but it's really an art, not a science, to make sense of it all. Therefore without demonstrable, significant failures of a particular design, I agree that there will be no clear " winner " . Des Tuck Bilateral BHR In a message dated 6/22/2004 8:29:49 PM Pacific Daylight Time, mdmcgr@yah oo.com writes: One possibility is that when all the results are in, there will be no clear " winner " of the different surface replacements. One way that could happen is that they mostly outlast our lifetimes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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