Dr. David Fischer

20, 26 years.

That's a, that's a good question, Stan.

I, you know, it's kind of, it's hard to say whether the incidence of these things is increasing.

Yeah.

Changed over the, over the course of your treatment and my career is, is the choices that we have for treating them.

So it's not, I mean, I remember my father had a terrible knee and, you know, it was just something you adjusted your life to and, and, uh,

you know, we've been able to treat people, whether it's arthroscopy in their younger years, you know, and I might mention to everybody that you had one of the most rare and unusual conditions I've ever seen in the knee.

In fact, and it was so early in my career that it kind of dumbfounded me at the time, but in fact,

I've only seen it in two patients in my whole career, and we actually wrote you up, you know, and published that congenital condition that you had.

But getting back to your question, it's possible that the increasing activity level that we're seeing in youths, you know, there's more and more kids that are starting in organized programs, and they're single specialty kids.

kids, they're competing and stressing their bodies at a much higher level in earlier years, more of them.

There are more patients and there's better treatment.

It's all led to a condition where we've stretched the indications for it.

30 years ago, the indications to do a knee replacement were quite a bit different than they are today.

We just didn't have the

the techniques, we didn't have the implants, we didn't have the confidence.

And so the whole spectrum of application of joint replacement has definitely increased.

Well, that was a, that was a remarkable invention and it was invented, uh, by a British, uh,

Professor, actually, not a surgeon, but a professor.

And it was the application of fiber optics.