Arthroscopic Hip Surgery in Richmond- 2015 Update

We began the arthroscopic hip surgery program at Johnston-Willis Hospital in 2010. At the time, there was little interest or recognition in the Richmond region about the nature of non-arthritic hip pain. In our first year, we performed 12 arthroscopic hip surgeries. In 2015, that number had grown to nearly 150, far and away the most in Central Virginia.

When we began the program, most of the cases were relatively simple arthroscopic surgeries involving debridement of small labral tears of the hip. Today, we have utilized hip arthroscopy not only for debridement of labral tears but also for labral repair, treatment of femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) with arthroscopic osteoplasty, removal of loose bodies from the hip, bone grafting of acetabular cysts, iliopsoas tenotomy for symptomatic tendinitis after total hip, assisted treatment of AVN of the femoral head, and treatment of traumatic injuries of the hip in young athletes.

We have seen so many patients who have been told “you just have bursitis”, “we think you have sciatica”, or “you need to wait and have a hip replacement” only to be evaluated and find that the problem could be treated with minimally invasive hip arthroscopy. The most common symptoms that indicate a patient may need arthroscopic hip surgery are pain in the groin and top of the thigh, feeling of catching or grinding in the hip, pain with prolonged sitting or riding in a car, and inability to exercise due to groin or lateral hip pain. We always work to see if the problem can be addressed non-operatively first however for many patients hip arthroscopy is a necessary solution.

Non-arthritic hip pain is often a misdiagnosed condition due to the fact that so few orthopaedic surgeons are skilled in this technically demanding surgery. Therefore, patients often bounce around from physician to physician until finally encountering an orthopaedic specialist familiar with this condition.

We are proud to offer our patients a complete spectrum of care for disorders of the hip. In addition to our arthroscopic program, we also performed over 250 hip replacement surgeries (both primary and revision) last year, yielding a total of 400 total hip surgery cases in 2015. This amount of experience is, again, unrivaled in Central Virginia. We look forward in 2016 to continuing to pursue new advancements in minimally invasive hip surgery for the patients of metro Richmond and Central Virginia.

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