Early Surgery Essential For Bone Deformities

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30855, 14 September 1965, Page 18

Early Surgery Essential For Bone Deformities

At one time the victims of poliomyelitis, rickets, and other crippling diseases were the main subjects for surgery of the hand, said Professor J. 1. P. James, of Edinburgh University, yesterday, but today most patients were victims of industrial accidents. Professor James is professor of orthopaedic surgery at Edinburgh University, and is here to lecture on surgery of the hand and other orthopaedic subjects to a course organised by the Christchurch Hospitals’ Post-graduate Society. He said that surgery of the hand was now a big part of orthopaedic surgery, mainly because the hand was the most commonly injured part of the body. It was a difficult problem because of the complicated functions the hand had to perform, but if treatment could begin quickly the final damage could be reduced tremendously. He said his university had a special hand clinic, and this meant that injured persons could get back to work much sooner.

It was important, he said,

for the injured person to be taken at once to the hospital which had the right facilities and equipment to do the work. In Britain many of the smaller hospitals did not have these facilities.

Operating for rheumatoid arthritis at an early stage could now prevent deformity to a very large extent, said Professor James. There was no way of preventing or curing the disease, but the effects of it could be prevented by early surgery. In the past those afflicted with the disease became very badly crippled by it, and surgery was done Usually at the end of the disease.

Early treatment required close co-operation between the physician who first saw the patient and the surgeon who was called in. Curvature of the spine is another subject on which Professor James is talking to the course, and he said this was another area where early surgery could nearly always prevent the bad effects which would otherwise lead to death at the age of 40.