I recently did an extensive reply on this issue on a personal email. I am sorry that I don't have the time to go into the depth of response that I did at that time, but here is the short version of it. There were just over 100 Biomet procedures reviewed in that study, and most had been performed in the past two years. From the statistics we know that they were performed by more than one doctor, though we do not know exactly how many. If we make a conservative estimate that there were three or four doctors involved, this would mean that they have averaged only about thirty or forty cases each, so they are very early in their learning curve. Also, most of the failures were happening in the first year, so even though the study does not specify, it is likely that femoral neck fracture was a common problem, which is often linked to surgeon inexperience.
Bottom line; it appears that most of these failures were happening with surgeons that were very new to the procedure, and the early failure rates would also seem to coincide with problems encountered by inexperienced surgeons.
There is another study out of Australia that shows that complications are many times higher in hospitals that do fewer procedures, and that would fit in well with these results.
Especially when on looks at the high success of Biomet in the hands of an extremely experienced surgeon like Dr. Gross, it would seem like the Biomet numbers from the Aust. Registry tell us a lot more about the failure rate with inexperienced surgeons, than it does about a brand of implant.
I am just another patient trying to make heads or tails of the research, but this is my take on this case.
Topic: Low BIOMET Scores on the Australian Ortho Registry 2009 (Read 5633 times)
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