O-leg, also known as rotundity, is a medical term we call inversion of the knee, i.e., when standing, the two sides of the ankle contact, but the knee joints can not come together. X-leg, i.e., when standing, the two sides of the knee close together, but the ankle can not contact, the medical term is called knee valgus. There is also a clinical condition in which only one leg is turned out, also known as K-leg in common parlance. This deformity is often a problem for people, especially those who love beauty.
Some people may ask, “I just have a crooked leg that affects my appearance, I don’t care about the appearance, so I don’t have to care. In fact, it is not so. We humans are upright animals, the weight of the whole body will pass down through the hip, knee and ankle joints, when normal, the line of force will be transmitted through the center of the knee joint, so that the pressure on the inside and outside of the knee joint is balanced; when your leg is crooked, the weight of the whole body through the inside or outside of the knee joint, will lead to uneven pressure on the inside or outside of the knee joint, resulting in premature degeneration of the medial or lateral joint cartilage.
The human body is a very amazing, skin and bones are probably the most dynamic tissues with high regenerative repair capacity. Bone tissue, in particular, can regenerate to completely repair a fracture after a fracture. However, very unfortunately, articular cartilage has a very limited ability to repair and regenerate and is among the first tissues to show signs of aging.
Such fragile tissues are subjected to a whole-body load and undergo hundreds of millions of cyclic movements during a person’s lifetime, and if they move on a wrong track, aging, which otherwise occurs slowly, proceeds at an accelerated pace. This is the fundamental reason why we treat O-leg and X-leg. Of course, everyone has a love of beauty, and having a perfect leg shape and a cure is not a double whammy.
Some people may ask, “How can my legs grow crooked? There are many reasons for this, such as trauma when you are small, with the growth and development of legs more and more crooked; or due to calcium deficiency, low phosphorus anti-D rickets and other bone metabolic diseases; after a fracture, fracture deformity healing; various congenital causes and so on.
How to treat it? Do I have to break the bone and rejoin it? For children, there is a strong ability to grow and develop, often the child will appear early physiological knee inversion deformity, as will stand, run and jump, the leg slowly corrected, parents do not have to worry too much. For children with childhood trauma, there are epiphyseal blocking techniques, or growth guides, to keep them from developing in a bad way.
For adults, the only way to correct the deformity is through surgical osteotomy. Some patients are very nervous when they hear about osteotomy, that is not to break the leg? In adults, the epiphysis has already closed and no longer has the ability to grow and develop, so the only way to correct the deformity is to amputate the bone. The surgery is a very minimally invasive method of osteotomy at a preoperatively designed site, with an incision of only 1-2 cm. The ends of the osteotomy are fixed with an external fixation brace, and you can walk on the ground with an abductor the day after the surgery.
It is important to prepare for the orthopedic surgery. Please refer to my article to understand whether the deformity is due to bone or soft tissue, the severity of the deformity, etc.