Thursday, September 5, 2019
A breakthrough therapy to help reduce pain has a local man up and walking again.
It's a kind of transplant that can help put comfort back in every step. This surgery helped Chuck Holbrook after a bad car accident.
By all accounts, after the head-on collision, Holbrook knew he was lucky to be alive.
"I mean, I was broken up nose to toe -- literally. Broken nose, five ribs broken, both my wrists and my knee and my toe," Holbrook said.
But now, Holbrook is back on his feet and pain-free, he says, partly due to a breakthrough procedure performed by OrthoCincy orthopedic surgeon Dr. John Larkin.
This procedure gave Holbrook back a whole new part of his knee: the cartilage.
"What's changed over the last couple of years is that we now have living cartilage that we can transplant into the knee," said Dr. Larkin.
To perform this procedure, Dr. Larkin simply cleans up the damaged area of the knee through a small incision and then the natural tissue graft is opened. The fluid is removed from the living cartilage, which is not rejected by the body.
"Cartilage doesn't have an immune response, so it's different than the heart or the lung, and so you don't have to have any type of immune suppression. It's nonallergenic," said Dr. Larkin.
Dr. Larkin then prepares the surface area of the knee for the transplant. He then takes the cartilage and places it into the knee. All this happens in less than 30 minutes. All that's left is healing time, which takes about three months.
"[After healing,] I had no pain. I have full range of motion. I've been an athlete most of my life...I thought I was done with all that, but now I got my strength back and I couldn't be happier," said Holbrook.
For more information on this type of surgery, you can call 859-301-2663