India is turning out to be a top destination for patients and travelers worldwide. With its state of the art hospitals and highly qualified UK and USA trained doctors, it will soon transform into the worldwide medical hub. This article gives information about the various aspects of getting the knee replacement surgery in India.
Bilateral knee replacement surgery:
Rheumatoid arthritis and Osteoarthritis commonly involve both the knees to a similar degree in the same person. Many such patients want a double knee replacement to revert back to normalcy as they can avoid another admission for the second knee replacement surgery at a later date.
A safe procedure of bilateral knee replacement surgery:
Many studies have vouched for the decreased morbidity after simultaneous replacement. Bilateral knee replacements are safe in young patients without cardiac problems. In older patients the risks may be higher. Here it is better to do a sequential TKR (replace one knee first and then replace the other after a gap of one to two months. This involves two periods of hospital stay.
Anesthesia is safely given by epidural catheters and postoperative pain relief is continued for 24- 48 hrs.
Costs for Bilateral knee replacement surgery:
The total cost will be very less in India, as there is only one hospitalization. The patient can go home by the 10th day in case of bilateral knee replacements. The cost is very less in India as compared to USA and UK.
Recovery period for bilateral knee replacement surgery:
This is shorter after double knee replacement surgery as the intervening period between sequential knee replacements is avoided.
The benefit of bilateral knee replacement surgery in India:
The time to full recovery is shorter. If that does not seem intuitive, think about it this way: If you figure it will take between 2-3 months to really start to feel right after a knee replacement, and you do that twice, that's 4-6 months of total recovery time. If you do them both the same day, you go through the experience once, and the whole thing is behind you in 2-3 months. Definitively, the biggest advantage is the cost of the Knee Replacement Surgery in India -which is very low in India.
The risks associated with bilateral knee replacement surgery in India:
The surgical risk appears to be increased. The types of complications that were more common in patients having the knees done together included: Temporary disorientation after surgery,
The need for blood transfusions, and Severe cardiac complications (which can be fatal).
If the complication rates were doubled in same-day both-knee surgery, we'd call that a tie, since you'd have to have the operation twice if you did it on separate surgical dates. However, the complication rates for all the complications listed above are more than double with same-day both-knee surgery. The absolute magnitude of the risk of heart attack is still not huge, but the difference was noticeable; the risk of needing a blood transfusion goes up considerably, though. So, in view of this, why would anyone want to do them both at once? My observation is there are two sets of feelings on the part of patients about this. Some people are risk-averse, and want to minimize the risk as completely as possible; clearly, they would want to do one knee at a time. Other people are what I call therapy-averse (or pain-averse), meaning they want to minimize the overall length of time they are either in physical therapy (perhaps for work reasons) and the overall length of time they are uncomfortable from the surgery. Provided they don't mind the increase in risk, these are good candidates for same-day both-knee surgery.
Now, getting the Knee Replacement Surgery in India could be highly beneficial due to highly reduced costs and extremely good medical care available. Medical tourism is the term coined which covers patients traveling across the globe for tourism purposes clubbing their requirements for treatment of acute illness, elective surgeries such as cardiology, hip replacement, knee replacement, etc. The government is taking serious initiatives in this regards and plans to start overseas marketing of India as a medical tourism destination. The government of India is of the opinion that by marketing India as a global medical tourism destination, it could capitalize on the low-cost, high-quality medical care available in the country.
No comments:
Post a Comment