The knee replacement is much more painful than a hip or shoulder.
Rotator Cuff Repair surgeries are notoriously painful! Many patients say it is the worst pain they have ever experienced. To make matters worse, you are bound up in a sling after surgery and can't move the arm to try to “find a comfortable spot”.
“It's a fairly easy recovery and not very painful, particularly compared to surgery to repair a rotator cuff tear.” Following surgery, you may be in a sling or a special 'shoulder immobilizer' depending on the surgery performed and your surgeon's preference.
The very thing that gives the shoulder its amazing range of motion also makes replacing it more complicated than the equivalent surgery for a hip or knee: Shoulder movement depends more on muscles and tendons than other major joints.
A rotator cuff surgery is a major surgical intervention in the shoulder, and the reason that there is pain after surgery is the amount of normal surgical trauma. Cutting, drilling, cauterizing, and suturing tissues create pain and inflammation.
When quantifying how much pain there is after surgery, it is relative to the patient. The pain after a knee replacement is typically no worse than one of your worst days before you had surgery. However, you can feel this way for the first two to three weeks after the day of surgery.
The biggest challenge in the early recovery of a TKR (up to 3 months postoperative) is the regaining of knee motion. We will send a physical therapist to your house to help you with the walking, knee exercises, and gentle manipulation of the knee.
The average recovery time from knee replacement surgery is approximately six months, but it can take roughly 12 months to fully return to physically demanding activities.
For example, shoulder surgery, anal surgery, and dental surgery were associated with the highest pain scores (median NRS = 4) on the fourth postoperative day. With these types of surgeries, severe pain (NRS > 5) was noted in over 28% of patients.
Loosening of the implant from the underlying bone can cause significant pain. Factors such as high-impact activities, excessive body weight, and general wear-and-tear of the plastic spacer between the two metal components of the implant can cause the implant to become loose.
Introduction: Pain can be severe during the first days after arthroscopic surgery, and acute pain is an important outcome in clinical trials of surgical technique or anaesthetic strategy.
Patients who are recovering from rotator cuff surgery know all too well that surgery on the shoulder is often painful. Some patients have very little pain after shoulder surgery, but most have significant pain for a few days to a few weeks.
After rotator cuff surgery, a small percentage of patients experience complications. In addition to the risks of surgery in general, such as blood loss or problems related to anesthesia, complications of rotator cuff surgery may include: Nerve injury.
“Most people are really happy with it. After they recover they ask, 'Why didn't I do this earlier? ' It really is a good surgery,” says Dan Paull, an orthopedic surgeon and founder and CEO of Easy Orthopedics.
The downside of knee replacement is that a small number of patients may experience surgical complications, including infection, blood clots, heart or lung risks, which in a small number of patients can be fatal.
You may NOT be a good candidate if:
Your knee symptoms are not related to joint disease. Your weight is too much for the artificial joint to support. You have fragile skin or poor skin coverage over your knee. You have a severe illness or infection.
Your body just went through a major surgery and needs time to heal. Most people can resume daily activities with reduced pain approximately three to six weeks after surgery. Full recovery can take anywhere from four months to a year.
As knee arthritis progresses, the knee becomes much looser and more unstable. In some cases, this is mild. In other cases, it is substantial enough that cause the patient to fall. Patients who have bone-on-bone arthritis and are starting to fall because of it should strongly consider surgery.
The pain can be a dull general ache, or it can feel severe and sudden if you tear your rotator cuff in an accident. Sometimes the pain can spread down towards your elbow. Shoulder pain often gets worse if you're doing something where you lift your arm or raise it above your head.
Surgery may be a good choice for you if both of the following are true: Shoulder pain or weakness limits your ability to do your daily activities, to be active, and to sleep well. These symptoms have not improved after a period of non-surgical treatment, including a well-designed physical rehabilitation program.
Knee replacement is technically more difficult to get right than hip replacement and this is one important reason why some patients have poorer results than others.