Minimally Invasive ACL Repair Surgery Has High Success Rate

NY1—May 16, 2016

NY1 health reporter Erin Billups interviews Gregory S. DiFelice, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at Hospital for Special Surgery, about his minimally invasive ACL repair technique, which provides a high success rate and shorter recovery time.

Dr. DiFelice comments, "The current practice is to take the entire ligament, take it out of the knee and replace it with a piece of dead tissue from your patella tendon or your hamstring tendon." Instead, Dr. DiFelice reattaches the ligament to the bone using minimally invasive techniques. Dr. DiFelice also mentions that his patients "recover in a fraction of the time. You keep all your native tissue, so you've got good blood supply to heal things and you keep all the nerve endings that are in that ligament."

For example, Erika Larose, who is a patient of Dr. DiFelice said, "After about, I'd say a month I was jogging and I was cycling."

This article originally appeared at NY1.com.