While the role of some medical practitioners is to care for their patients’ general health, others focus on more specific aspects, such as conditions affecting the brain, heart, lungs, kidneys, or gastrointestinal tract. Physicians and early surgeons were already treating fractured limbs and correcting spinal deformities in children during Roman times. However, orthopaedics, the work of bone specialists, was only recognised as a medical speciality within the last 150 years.
That said, the specialism has advanced steadily over that century and a half. Today, its practitioners routinely perform procedures that their predecessors only dreamed of and are changing the lives of men, women and children in pain and immobilised by damaged or diseased bones and joints.
Some Common Conditions Treated by Bone Specialists
An adult human has 206 bones, 80 of which comprise the axial skeleton, consisting of the skull, spinal column, rib cage, the tiny ossicles in the ears and the hyoid bone. The axial skeleton provides the core supporting the remaining 126 bones that form the appendicular skeleton. Technically, all bones are in the purview of the orthopaedic specialist. In practice, however, their primary focus is on the long bones, pelvic girdle, knee and shoulder joints, and the associated muscles, tendons and ligaments.
Should you suffer a sprained ankle or pull a muscle, you can generally treat such minor injuries at home. However, fractures and damaged or diseased joints require the attention of bone specialists. They use X-rays and other medical imaging techniques or an arthroscope to view a joint’s interior for diagnostic purposes before deciding how best to treat various skeletal problems. The following are three of the most common:
- Osteoarthritis: This condition results from the gradual erosion of the protective layer of cartilage covering the articulating surfaces of the bones in a joint and most frequently affects the knee and hip joints. The resulting bone-on-bone movement causes increasing pain and swelling, leading to diminished mobility. Patients will eventually need an orthopaedic surgeon to replace the damaged portions with prosthetic components, a procedure termed arthroplasty.
- Torn Meniscus: The term refers to a crescent-shaped pad of cartilage that serves as a shock absorber between the femur and tibia. The meniscus often becomes torn when twisting the knee whilst playing a sport, causing pain and tenderness and requiring bone specialists to perform a surgical repair.
- Rotator cuff injury: This descriptive term refers to a ring of muscles and tendons surrounding the shoulder joint that join the humerus and scapula, stabilising it and facilitating joint rotation. Injury to the rotator cuff causes a dull ache that increases with movement and at night. Conservative treatments like topical and systemic analgaesics, ice packs, rest, and physiotherapy can be effective, but an orthopaedic specialist will invariably need to perform surgery on the more severe cases.
Bone Specialists in Gauteng
Dr Jan de Vos is one of South Africa’s foremost orthopaedic specialists. He and his talented surgical team operate from the Wilgers Life Hospital in Pretoria, specialising in arthroscopy and minimally invasive procedures, including total knee and hip replacement. To learn more about these and other services from Dr De Vos and his team, click here to complete an online enquiry form.
