Dr. Fernando Noriega's Blogspot

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 02:59 PM PDT

For those who follow this blog, you may remember that I published a post in March about a Galician patient who suffered from a lateral talus osteochondral lesion, which had been evolving for two years, on the side of his talus bone. This patient went through two arthroscopies in his hometown, a surgical technique that is relatively easy yet that, in many cases, proves ineffective.

In this patient’s words, the doctors who operated on him had said that a mosaicplasty could not be done because the injury was too far to the side. Well, we were able to complete this operation successfully. We had to cut the tibia and the fibula in order to access the side of the talus bone, and once we got in, we cleaned up the lesion and substituted the damaged cartilage with grafts taken from the knee of the same leg. The patient began physical therapy as soon as possible to avoid rigidity, and so far, his recovery process has gone very well.

As you can see in the video, the patient is not only capable of walking, but also of running, and I have no doubt that he will be able to return to a normal working and personal life. Today, I have seen patients from Bilbao, Ciudad Real, Cuenca and Madrid. The majority had already been treated in hospitals beforehand in which they were asked to complete many tests, many without reason, while the physicians involved had forgotten to adequately explore the reasons why there was a lesion. In other cases, these treatments had not been properly directed toward fixing the lesion and leaving the ankle in its original, pre-accident state, so when the doctors realized that the progress of the recovery had not followed the correct path, they ended up telling the patient that they should undergo an ankle fixation, which, in most cases, would be a ridiculous operation to perform.

Every day, my patients confirm for me the extent to which so many doctors lack responsibility and commitment to solving their patients’ problems, and, above all, lack the humility to admit that they don’t possess the knowledge necessary to face their patients’ medical issues. Leave your judgments behind, your patients will thank you for it if, instead of carrying out procedures that don’t work, you refer them to specialized centers in which we can properly heal their injuries. Just watch this video and you can see for yourself; what we are doing is real, and we will keep expanding our knowledge to successfully solve all kinds of problems for all kinds of patients.

Let’s get running!