Knee arthroscope

The knee arthroscope is the most common operation required in football players.

It is usually performed to repair or remove meniscal tears inside the knee joint. The meniscal layer of the knee is a floating layer of two cartilages (medial and lateral meniscus) that are commonly torn.

The recovery from a knee arthroscopy depends on the type of injury treated, but the proced ure itself is usually very minimally invasive.

Football players can sometimes recover within a week of a knee arthroscopy. For example, Adam Dykes , when playing with the Cronulla Sharks, played within 5 days of a knee arthroscopy as his team were involved in the 2001 NRL finals.

Top surgeon admits thousands of unnecessary knee arthroscopies are performed

Writing in an August 2003 edition of the Medical Journal of Australia , top Melbourne knee surgeon Julian Fellar admitted the results of recent scientific trials have questioned the value of knee arthroscopy in osteoarthritis . Although numbers of arthroscopies for this condition are uncertain, Fellar - in the article written with Adam Chapman - thinks it is a "considerable proportion" of the 56,000 knee arthroscopies performed in Australia each year. The major paper which started the questioning process regarding knee arthroscopy in osteoarthrtitis was published by Moseley et al in the New England Medical Journal last July. Sports physician John Orchard of injuryupdate.com.au has analysed this paper in a previous editorial in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport  (.pdf), but the Fellar editorial is significant in that it is actually a top Australian surgeon admitting that knee arthroscopy is overused. In a time when so many potentially beneficial treatments are underfunded by the government because "the health system cannot afford to pay for them" it is amazing that surgeons have carte blanche for their patients to receive Medicare funding for any procedure they wish. Click here to read more injury reports .

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