Turns out, I’m hip to a new trend.
The fastest growing group? It isn’t retirees, but rather people ages 55 to 64, says Matt Sloan, a surgical resident at the University of Pennsylvania medical school who hasI wanted a new hip because I’d been in pain for years. In 2010, when I was in my early 30s, I tore my labrum, which is ring-likein the joint. A painful arthroscopic surgery in 2011 to repair it failed to make my hip better, and I needed a “revision” surgery.
Here’s how it works: The four parts of a modern artificial hip replace a big ball and socket joint. During the operation, after the surgeon cuts off that ball at the top of the femur—the thigh bone, if you’re singing along—they insert a titanium stem inside the hollowed-out bone, with a portion of it still protruding. Then, a ceramic head , attaches to the top of the stem; mine was made by German company Caramtec, and has a pinkish hue.
By the 1960s, hip replacements began to take on their modern form, thanks largely to a British orthopedic surgeon named John Charnley. According to former Massachusetts General Hospital hip surgeon William Harris, Charnley had an “incredible single focus—nothing else in the world mattered except solving this problem: creating an artificial hip joint.”
Eventually, Charnley landed on a plastic called high-density polyethylene. It didn’t wear down as rapidly as Teflon, which he confirmed by testing the materials in his own leg. “After nine months in situ, the two PTFE specimens are clearly palpable as nodules,” he wrote in a letter to the. “They are almost twice the volume of the original implant.” Polyethylene had no such problem.