Word: charnley
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...vastly improved artificial hip has now been devised. Using a replacement hip of his own design and a unique sterilization technique, Surgeon John Charnley, 59, of England's Wrightington Hospital at Wigan, has performed 4,000 hip operations and cut the infection rate among his patients from 4% to .5%. Two major U.S. medical centers, New York's Hospital for Special Surgery and Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, are now performing the operations...
...immobilizing pain. Replacing the head of the femur with a stainless steel ball (just under an inch in diameter for the average patient) is relatively easy. The difficulty is to secure the ball to the femur. In early operations, the shaft holding the ball was screwed into the femur. Charnley was dissatisfied with the method because the shaft sometimes came loose. A dentist friend proposed that he "cement" it in with methyl methacrylate, a plastic used for years in dentistry. "My friend couldn't have suggested anything better," says Charnley. "It was a tremendous advance. The prosthesis [artificial part...