What are real success rates for surgery for femoroacetabular impingement?

When you do research on FAI surgery, you often come across numbers that sound spectacular. You find claims that hip surgery for FAI is about 80% effective in curing your hip pain.

If this number were correct, surgery for FAI would make a lot of sense. Why suffer with hip pain, clicking, and snapping when you can just do a surgery and be 100% back to normal? Everyone wants to be able to move well, play sports, and enjoy their daily lives, right?

 

What’s the real success rate for surgery for femoroacetabular impingement?

The real success rate of surgery for femoral acetabular impingement is unfortunately nowhere near 80%.

A study published in January of 2013 investigated the relationship between patient expectations and hip...

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Is Arthoscopic Hip Surgery for FAI better than physical therapy?

New Study Compares Arthroscopic Surgery for FAI to Conservative Treatment

In a recent study, researchers compared the effectiveness of arthroscopic surgery for FAI versus conservative treatment (non-surgical methods and physical therapy).[1]  The researchers concluded that surgery for FAI was more effective than non-surgical treatment.

Other studies have shown that physical therapy and surgery for FAI are equally disappointing. So like any study, sometimes you have to lift the hood and look at the fine print to see what's really going on. 

An analysis of the data actually shows us that neither FAI treatment was that good.  Arthroscopic surgery for FAI showed weak results. The nonsurgical treatment for FAI showed weak...

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Hip injection for FAI and labral tears: is it worth it? Is it accurate?


Are you considering a hip injection to test for femoroacetabular impingement (FAI)? Has a hip surgeon told you he can use a hip injection to diagnose FAI or a labral tear with certainty? In this article, you'll discover the truth about hip injections for FAI (and related hip joint pathology like labral tears).

 

 

Why get a hip injection for FAI?

The current medical approach to the diagnosis of FAI relies on several tests. One test is anesthetic injection into your hip joint.

Hip surgeons believe that if the injection relieves pain, you have a problem inside your hip joint (like a labral tear and/or FAI). Surgeons suggest that a successful injection indicates surgery is likely to be helpful. (source).

In other words, if an...

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How Shifting Your Perspective on Chronic Pain Can Help You Heal

 

When it comes to lower back, hip, and knee pain, we can get caught in a cycle of beliefs that can make our pain worse. Here's how functional training may be the way to break the cycle. 

 

Table of Contents

When you’re suffering from chronic pain, you may search for the meaning behind your suffering, asking yourself What's wrong with me? Or What did I do to deserve this?

However, the meanings we ascribe to our chronic pain...

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Special tests for FAI - the truth about FADIR and FABER and other hip impingement tests

If you have hip pain, and you've been told you have femoroacetabular impingement (FAI), you may have had a series of movement tests (called "special tests" in medical jargon) done to confirm your diagnosis.

If you have hip pain and are wondering if there are good tests for femoroacetabular impingement that will tell you if you have FAI, you may found a number of common tests that are believed to be reliable.

In either case, this article is going to cover something medical literature on FAI overlooks: the tests for hip pain causes are wildly unreliable.

 

What are special tests for femoroacetabular impingement?

A special test for FAI is simply a movement that doctors believe demonstrates that hip bone shape is responsible for your...

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Diagnostic injections and femoroacetabular impingement

If you suspect you have hip pain from femoroacetabular impingement, you may be considering a hip injection. 

I've been doing a lot of research on FAI as part of my duties as one of the co-creators of the FAI Fix. In a recent YouTube comment, an orthopedic physician angrily pointed out that hip joint injections supposedly identify whether hip pain is caused by problems IN the hip joint, like FAI. 

I found his comment interesting, so I did more research on hip injections for FAI. I am going to share some of the results of this research here.

 

Hip injections for FAI - is the pain caused by what's in the joint?

I started going through the available medical literature on femoroacetabular impingement...

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Can miserable malalignment be fixed quickly?

If you've never heard of the medical diagnosis "miserable malalignment" it's because it hasn't been discussed much until recently. The first time I heard about it was from a client. She was a physical therapist who had been diagnosed with the condition.

femoral internal rotationThe right leg (left in the picture) has relatively internally rotated femur and externally rotated tibia.

Why is it en vogue now? Because a growing number of surgeons are starting to talk about the surgery as a surefire cure for knee, leg, and hip pain. 

But as we've seen with spine, hip, knee, and shoulder surgeries, the medical industry has a long history of overselling the benefits of new orthopedic surgeries.

So in this article, we're going to take a closer non-medical look...

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How do you fix a leg length discrepancy?

In this article we're going to talk about what to do in case you have a leg length discrepancy. You may have been told by a chiropractor or a massage therapist that one of your legs is longer than the other. Maybe you've noticed one leg seems to reach out further than the other when you walk and so you suspect a difference.

What should you do about it? How do you think about a leg length discrepancy in a way that will help you make as much progress with your body on your own?  

 

Why you might care about leg length

If your legs are of different lengths, you'll be literally off-kilter. When standing, one half of your pelvis will sit higher than the other and will likely be tilted anteriorly or posteriorly...

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Hip injections and joint pathology - 90% reliable for finding the cause of hip pain?

Why am I talking about hip injections?

In a previous post, I shared an orthopedic physician's objections to what we've been talking about with FAI, and in a follow up I talked about hip injections and their reliability and usefulness (spoiler: they don't seem reliable or particularly useful). In case you missed the original YouTube comment from the orthopedic physician, here's a relevant snippet:

 

Since your [sic] so knowledgeable of the hip joint anatomy I hope you would agree that using a [sic] anesthetic agent and steroid agent to inject into the hip joint would sufficiently rule in or rule out the diagnosis of labral pathology or intra-articular pathology. Guess what? We do it all the time. How could it be...
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