Major recall on hip replacement devices
// September 25th, 2010 // No Comments » // Personal Injury
The world of health has suffered a shocking revelation as DePuy, a subsidiary firm of the health giant Johnson & Johnson, ordered a major recall of all its hip replacement devices.
Hip replacement is a tricky surgery, as I’m sure you imagine. It’s a very sensitive area of the human body and crucial to motion and for people to be able to live a normal life. There is some debate in the Medicine world about the best materials and best way of going about doing a hip replacement surgery. In laymen’s terms, the hip joint is your average ball and socket joint. The thigh bone ends in a ball that fits into a socket in the hip. Some medical experts claim that having both the ball and the socket made out of metal is a better combination as the materials are better lubricated and the joint performs better. Others believe that a combination of a plastic socket with a metal ball is better, since it reduced the amount of debris cause by the friction between the two parts. Metal debris in the body, as you may understand, is not a good thing. Usually patients can deal with it and not require any additional treatment for it, but in some cases a second surgery is required to handle the swelling and inflammation caused by the debris.
The DePuy asr hip recalls occurred because the percentage of patients developing said complications was much larger than the normal rate, averaging one out of every eight cases. There are reports that the company knew about this situation for some time but only acted upon in now, which also triggered a class action lawsuit against DePuy.
