Wreader

I think some of the variability in rehab has to do with how much joint destruction there was before surgery, how invasive the surgery was, what your pain tolerance is, and what your baseline level of strength or fitness was pre-op. If you had pretty good muscle and range of motion, but pain in the joint, just replacing the joint might be a relatively simple matter, and the rehab might be pretty quick. If you have lost a lot of motion, and/or lost a lot of muscle mass. If you need to have more or less bone taken to accomplish the replacement, etc... your rehab will be longer or shorter. It is pretty variable. Floyd Landis had a total hip and was back on the cycling circuit within, I think it was 4 or 6 months. To say that people should not have their joints replaced when they fail seems to be a bit short-sighted. If a joint replacement costs $X today, and the technology is improving every year, then you can expect that over time, the techniques will be better, the re-hab times will be shorter, and the cost will go down. This happened with coronary bypass graft (CABG) surgery. 30 years ago, a CABG was the state of the art treatment for end stage coronary artery disease (knows in the parlance as a massive myocardial infarction - or a heart attack). Over time, the techniques got better, the invasiveness of the procedure got less and less, and a huge number of people who a few years ago would have required a CABG, now have a cardiac catheritization and stents placed in the affected vessels. That is how medicine works. You (in this case let's say you are a cardiac surgeon) find a way to treat a problem. You invent a better suture or a better instrument or a quicker technique, etc., you take your savings or your retirement money and invest it in this new treatment. Then, as the years go by, smarter guys come along behind you and tweak your technique or your procedure or your instrument or whatever, and so on and so forth, and over time, with more and more improvements, patient survival gets better and better, and the risks of the procedure get lower and lower, and the cost goes down. It is much cheaper to go to the cath lab for two hours and have a stent put in and go home the next day, than it is to have open heart surgery, spend three days in the ICU and go home a week later.