You, Too, Can Have A Bionic Body

In the meantime, old-school replacements have evolved, too—they’re now made from more-durable plastics than they used to be. And surgeons have expanded their range. “There’s a replacement for just about everything now,” says Moorman. Shoulder implants have become mainstream, elbow implants are on the rise and ankle replacements have transformed from awkward devices into streamlined, highly engineered wonders made from light and durable material. “Twenty-five years ago, they didn’t work very well and they didn’t last, so we stopped doing them,” says Zuckerman. “They came, and went, and now they’ve come back again.” One recent case report on the new ankle replacements tells of a patient who, less than two years after surgery, went on “an aggressive hiking and fishing trip in Patagonia, where he was able to perform unlimited hiking at steep elevations and fish in rocky creek beds”—a success by any metric.

There’s even a new take on the old stalwart surgery, the knee replacement: now it can be custom-made, a development that should surprise no one in the age of custom everything-else. “For 25 years we have put every replacement knee in at the same angle—your knee, my knee, my mother’s knee,” says Joseph Vernace, an orthopedic surgeon at Bryn Mawr Hospital, near Philadelphia. “The problem is, we’re not all built the same.” Using a new system called OtisKnee, pioneered by orthopedic surgeon Stephen Howell, docs can view the knee with MRI scans and superimpose different implants on it for the best fit. The early results on OtisKnee look good. Take Vernace’s patient Terry Gibbs, who had his left knee custom-made in 2006 (and his right knee replaced traditionally five years earlier). “I went to a wedding six weeks after the [second] operation,” he says, “and when someone asked me how I was doing, I did a deep-knee bend.”

A word of caution, though: not all patients are out there doing deep knee bends. Most don’t get back the range of motion they had when they were 18 (or 28 or 38). “The patient who comes to me and says, ‘I can’t run five miles anymore and I want an implant so I can do it again’—that’s not who I’m going to do it for,” says Zuckerman. Artificial joints wear out—the average life of a prosthetic is 15 to 20 years—and a patient who puts too much stress on his new implant may soon need another one.

Still, there’s always hope. Burke, the outdoorswoman, is now walking more than a mile a day, an exercise she finds “liberating,” if not quite liberating enough. What she really wants is “to get back to a national park and go for a nice big hike with my family.” Yes, she has a new knee, but what really matters is her feet. She’s back on them.

© 2007