50 Years Ago in Corr: Technic of the Resection-Angulation Operation for Hip-Joint Disabilities Henry Milch MD CORR;13:265–270

Excerpt

This month’s symposium is devoted to papers presented at the annual meetings of The Hip Society. For the majority of patients over the age of 45–50, most surgeons recommend total hip arthroplasty (THA) for conditions that destroy the hip. THA was developed in the early 1960s by Sir John Charnley [2, 3]. By the late 1960s, a number of surgeons in Europe and those contributing to FDA trials for the required bone cement in the US were performing the operation in older patients. When the FDA approved bone cement for general use in the early 70s, THA became the standard of care, replacing a variety of procedures such as osteotomies, cup arthroplasty, hemiarthroplasty, fusion, and resection arthroplasty. The operation was and is one of the most successful elective operations in any field of surgery. However, before that time surgeons had to recommend one of the other sorts of operations, the outcomes of which were far less certain: they did not reliably relieve pain, range of motion was infrequently restored to normal (and of course obliterated with fusion), and while function often improved it was usually not normal. Further, many of these patients would continue to have deterioration of the hip and require further operations. …