ANKLE & FOOT
Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) has become popular in all surgical fields and has had a positive impact on the field of orthopedic surgery for both surgeons and patients alike. This concept and movement within medicine focuses on performing surgeries with equal or improved outcomes while minimizing soft tissue dissection and surgical exposure. Orthopedic surgeons have been developing MIS techniques for surgeries related to the upper and lower extremities as well as the spine.
MIS is a relatively new concept within orthopedic foot and ankle surgery. The idea is to be able to perform common orthopedic foot and ankle surgeries using significantly smaller incisions in conjunction with specially designed minimally invasive techniques and equipment to allow for less soft tissue damage, faster recovery, earlier mobilization, and less pain.
For example, a common procedure orthopedic foot and ankle surgeons perform is a bunion repair. A bunion is a deformity of the big toe often associated with a “bump” on the inside of the big toe. There are various surgical techniques that can be used to correct this deformity including soft tissue repairs, osteotomies (cutting bone and realigning it), a combination of both, and fusion surgeries (getting two bones to heal together across a joint). Traditionally, to perform these techniques, the surgeon makes various incisions about the big toe, lesser toes, and sometimes the midfoot to accomplish correction. However, MIS techniques allow for small (poke hole) incisions to be made about the big toe in order to cut the bone and realign it with percutaneous fixation using screws. The result is less soft tissue damage, less pain, faster recovery, and significant deformity corrections.
There are various other applications for MIS within orthopedics and orthopedic foot and ankle surgery.
Please see FootCareMD.org for more. And here for MIS information.
