Looking to treat severe knee medial compartment OA

[ubercool]

Hi people, my TKR surgery is scheduled for next Wednesday. Just got a call from a medical equipment company that wants me to rent two devices:

1. Cold therapy machine with an ice mold that helps with healing: $250 for a three-week rental.
2. CPM leg machine that helps with regaining range-of-motion and kickstarts PT: $200 for a three-week rental.

Are any of you able to give some advice on whether these devices are worth it?

Things seemed to be going well for you in the previous update. What made you schedule the TKR?

Good luck with the surgery!

Ha, better now. I canceled the surgery. That call from the guy trying to rent me all that CPM and cryo equipment led me actually to research what was involved, and it got me scared again. I was aware that there would be pain, but what I didn't really grasp is that it would take as much as 3-6 months to recover from surgery fully.

And I had already made arrangements to teach a class in San Francisco, which would have involved traveling the following week. Silly me!

Anyway, I have an appointment with a PA at the end of March, and we will explore options to keep my knee in decent shape until surgery becomes actually necessary. Let's hope for 2024 or 2025.

[silver_maple]

Ubercool, thanks for the updates.

If memory holds, you were (almost) bone on bone so as we discussed stems were iffy but generally would not do harm other than $$.

So how do you assess the BMAC's effectiveness ~ 10 months post-op? The fact you were looking at TKR is perhaps a clue but you postponed TKR so maybe BMAC gave you a bit of a breather? Conflicting signals.

I had not done knee OA research for ~ 9 months. Scanned the recent literature today via PubMed and could find zero progress, unfortunately. For some extra colour, what class are you teaching?

So the conventional view remains OA is irreversible, untreatable, gradually progressing. To manage: stay lean, low impact daily movement (walk, swim, bike), good diet, maybe with chondroitin supplementation if in Europe. PRP/stems dubious but can counter flairs and maybe slow down the degeneration.

[ubercool]

Good to hear from you, silver_maple.

Come to think of it, I was probably in a lot more pain last year before I underwent the stem-cell procedure. Unfortunately, lacking an accurate way to recollect pain, I'm not 100% sure, but since you raised the possibility of post-op success, maybe I was able to last longer on a bad knee due to the BMAC.

Thanks for the diet suggestion, I had never heard of chondroitin supplementation. I teach grad students about trends and innovation.