Safdarjung Hospital doctors cure ligament damage by stitching

In a rare surgery, doctors at city-based Safdarjung Hospital on Friday cured a teenager with severe ligament avulsion fracture through mere stitches instead of using any implant like screws or endo button, doctors said on Friday.

According to the doctors, the other advantages of such surgeries is that such techniques brings down the cost by 70-80 per cent.

The unique surgery, which has been adopted by a few nations such as Germany and US, was performed by a team of doctors lead by Balvinder Singh, an Assistant Professor of Orthopaedics at Safdarjung Hospital.

According to Singh, 18-year old Ankur was unable to walk and bed ridden for the last three weeks after meeting with an accident and suffered from posterior cruciate ligament avulsion fracture.

Posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) avulsion fractures are a type of avulsion fracture of the knee that represent the most common isolated PCL lesion. This typically involves separation of the posterior tibial insertion of the PCL to variable degrees.

"Unlike open ortho surgeries till now, in this case we performed arthoscopic surgery and used stitches to treat the problem," said Singh.

The laprascopic ortho surgery was performed on Friday and some of the other doctors included senior residents Taha Ahmed and Mohit Garg and anaesthetist Anshu Meena.

"The patient had come to us as a last resort and we chose to perform this unique surgery," said Singh.

According to the doctors,A the open surgeries which cost the patient over Rs 1.5 lakh in private hospitals while more than Rs 50,000 in government hospitals can come down to Rs 10,000 if this surgery is adopted.

--IANS

rup/pgh/dg