Dr. David Fischer

And thank goodness it happens most of the time, but no, there's a fair amount of anxiety with, with any surgery, I think.

Well, these would all be, you know, for the most part, these were all seniors, you know, they, they were probably in their, uh,

The exception would be the less common patient that had some sort of a problem beginning much earlier in their life.

But I would say they're all seniors, which is a bit of a concern as well because they're all higher risks for surgical procedures and the rehabilitation, all the things that go with a major operation.

I would say the majority were being their 70s.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think probably go through a series of, of, uh,

steps here you know it starts with you know we use physical therapy we use medication yeah that then injections and you use them in kind of a serial way and yeah as they fail to provide relief you go to the next step and and they you know everything is time limited for the most part and

Unfortunately, the worse the arthritis is, the less predictable all of those other methods are.

But for the most part, you go through them.

They do help people probably stretch a little more time out of their knees.

And also the current insurance situation, for example.

sometimes mandates that, you know, that before a patient is eligible for a knee replacement, have they failed a course of physical therapy?

Have they failed medication?

You know, those are steps to maybe not postpone the inevitable, but put it off at least satisfactorily.

And it also serves the other purpose that

I think when patients are ready for surgery, they understand that they've exhausted these other, other options that they, they just haven't helped.

And they're just a little more prepared for, for an operation.

Well, that was a good indication for it.