Japanese Doctor Talks Sports Injury Repair
CHENNAI: In a bid to get more surgeons to use bone-tendon grafts while doing Anterior Curate Ligament (ACL) reconstruction surgeries on sportspersons’ knees, a Japanese doctor has brought a new technique that will make the process easier.
“Using the BPTB graft was the gold standard in ACL repair across the world but it used to cause a lot of trouble,” said Dr Sunny Iwasaki, an expert orthopaedic surgeon from Japan at the Apollo Speciality Hospitals in Vanagaram.
Explaining how the process had been evolved, he said, “Arthroscopy wasn’t so big even in Japan, when I did medical school in 1983 — despite the fact that it had been evolved in our country. From that time, people had switched over to using hamstring instead of BPTB. We quit using it because there was anterior knee pain, kneeling pain and loss of quadriceps strength,” said the surgeon, explaining the technique to doctors there.
He went on to explain that his friend Enaku Koh was doing a lot of ACL work for high school rubgy players and evolved this method, “He was always doing bone-tendon-bone though most people had moved to hamstrings by the mid-90s. That is where I learnt to do this technique,” he said.
With just a few differential tools, the bone-tendon graft is removed through minor incisions in the knee and is then set in the right spot to complete the ACL repair.
Lots of sportspersons who play games like rugby and soccer often find their knee ligaments worn out and require this surgery.