As a surgeon with a specialty practice in hip and knee replacement surgery, patients rely on my expertise.  Recently, a patient asked me why I no longer use the anterior approach for total hip replacement.  I stopped performing this procedure because in my experience there are no advantages to the surgery, rather a number of potential disadvantages.  Simply, I couldn't continue to use a procedure that I could not trust to deliver every time.

Unfortunately, there are a significant number of people who have undergone total knee replacement (TKR) and are not happy with the result. Some studies estimate 20% or more fall into this category. Defining success or a “satisfactory result” can mean two very different things to an individual who had the total knee versus the surgeon who implanted it.