Of course, it?s better to avoid the need in the first place. ?
Don?t get injured,? says Dr.
Frank Noyes, an orthopedic surgeon and the chairman of the Cincinnati SportsMedicine and Orthopaedic Center. Noyes has developed a program to help young female athletes avoid A.C.
L. tears, one of the most debilitating knee injuries. (Women athletes, depending on their sport, are as much as 10 times more likely to tear their A.
C.L. than male athletes are, for a variety of anatomical and physiological reasons.
) His Sportsmetrics system teaches young athletes how to leap and land correctly. Taught free to high school teams in Cincinnati, it?s available at a nominal cost to individual players or teams elsewhere in the country ( ).
But if it?s too late for prevention ? if you?
ve already spent a heedless youth slamming your knees into turf or court ? you need to see an orthopedic surgeon.
No longer do top-notch doctors simply yank out tissues.
?We can suture ligaments and tendons now,? Noyes says.
?We can even suture and save menisci,? a procedure long thought to be impossible.
(If your surgeon suggests that a torn meniscus or tendon be removed, get a second opinion.)
?We?
ve entered the age of what I call ?biological? instead of ?
bionic? repair of joints,? Stone says.
Using sterilized tissues from humans, or even from pigs ? a technique Stone has pioneered, partly in response to concern about illegally harvested cadavers ? doctors can make repairs.
They can transplant a meniscus into the knee of someone who has had his removed. They can patch torn A.C.
L.?s and P.
C.L.?
s or graft in new ones (the same procedure performed on Streb, who, despite the fresh tear to her A.C.L.
, is still competing). They can remove some of a person?s chondrocytes, clone them in the lab, mix them with blood and smear the resulting paste, like a grout, over damaged patches of cartilage.
All of these procedures are meant to help people stave off artificial knee replacement, which can severely restrict activity, since artificial joints wear out.
?I couldn?
t live like that,? says Henry Marks, a 45-year-old recreational athlete in Newman, Calif., and the quintessential new-millennium knee patient.
Back in the 1970?s, after he crashed his motorbike in too many races, doctors removed much of the meniscus from each of his knees. From then on, he limped and was in pain, an impediment to the road biking, hiking, snowboarding and skiing that he continued to do regardless.
Finally, he went to Kevin Stone to have his knees rebuilt. He underwent a meniscus implant and a cartilage grout. Within a few months, he was back at it.
?I said to Dr. Stone, ?
If I wreck my cartilage again, can you fix it?? And he said, ?
Sure.? So I?
ll be launching myself on my snowboard again this winter.?
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