Articles Tagged with Boston DePuy hip injury lawyer

Johnson & Johnson is company many consumers associate with baby shampoo and Band-Aids.  While it is true  the company makes these products, the firm’s real profits come from the fact that it is a major pharmaceutical manufacturer as well as major maker of medical devices and durable medical equipment (DME), such as artificial hips and knee implants.

The company owns another company known as DePuy, and that company is a major producer of hip joints, including many that have been found to be defective. According to a news article from Fox News, a jury in Dallas has just awarded victims of the Pinnacle hip implant over $1 billion in damages. Continue reading

A recent article from NBC News takes a look at one new hip replacement procedure now being used and the history of advancements in hip replacement surgery in general. These days, a total hip replacement has become the second most common surgical procedure in the U.S., with the first being a total knee replacement.  Each year, more than 300,000 hip replacements are performed in the U.S. alone.

If you went to get a total hip replacement around 20 years ago, you would expect to be spending around two weeks in an an inpatient rehab center following surgery.  During this time, a therapist would help you out of bed using lifts and then help you get to an exercise room where you would be told to perform a series of exercises each day.  There are two main reasons for this: The first reason is that if a patient was in bed the whole time, he or she would be a high risk for developing a serious and potentially deadly clotting disorder known as deep vein thrombosis (DVT). Continue reading

There are a variety of ways a total hip replacement surgery can be performed these days. While every procedure ultimately involves making an incision and removing the patient’s deteriorating hip and replacing it with an artificial device, some doctors will make an anterior incision, some will cut along the side, some will cut through the muscle, while others will move the muscle.  There is now a special table that doctors can use to give them better access to the site of procedure, and in some cases, doctors will use computers to make the map the site and even robots to perform the actual surgery.

While the proponents of every one of these techniques obviously claims that their procedure is the best, a recent report outlined in News Medical looks at the results following various techniques to see which one actually has better results in the various cases. Continue reading

There have been a lot of advances in the total hip replacement surgery process over the past decade.  Much of that has focused on the development of new artificial hip joints as well as computer aided methods of performing the operation.  There have also been improvements in the cutting guides surgeons use to know where to make the cuts and align the device.

A cutting guide is similar to a carpenter’s jig and allows the surgeon to make as precise as possible cut in the patients existing joint and bone to allow for a proper tight fit for the new artificial joint.  The better the new joint matches up, the less of a chance there will be any complications later on. Continue reading

In a recent news feature from Tech Times, a study was discussed which suggests that patients with mental health issues tend to have more complications following total hip replacement surgery than those who do not suffer from mental illness. This study also suggests that doctors who are going to perform total hip replacement surgery on patients with mental disabilities should discuss these potential complications with the patients, and if appropriate and necessary, the patient’s family prior to preforming the operation.

While this may be surprising, researchers have known for a long time that mental health patients who undergo spinal surgery and heart surgery, as well as general surgery, tend to suffer more complications that patients without any mental illness.  Researchers have also found a high coloration between post-operative complications and certain mental health conditions such as depression.  Continue reading