Walking on the ground 24-48 hours after knee arthroplasty

  Rapid rehabilitation of artificial knee replacements is always a hot topic. The key factors for rapid recovery after knee replacement are intraoperative minimally invasive, precise osteotomy and soft tissue balance, and good postoperative analgesic measures.  Intraoperative minimally invasive is the main factor. The popular small-incision knee replacement eventually declined in previous years, mainly because small incisions do not mean minimally invasive, but rather because small incisions lead to increased disadvantages such as deep operation trauma, long operation time, and inaccurate prosthesis installation position. Minimally invasive should be reflected in: proper incision exposure, reduction of unnecessary operations, shortening of tourniquet time, shortening of operation time, and osteotomy and soft tissue balance in one go as much as possible.  After implementing the above principles, combined with good postoperative analgesic measures, we have achieved promising results. The patient’s time to walk on the ground will be from the previous average of 5.4 days postoperatively to the current average of 36.8 hours postoperatively (between 24-48 hours).  Moreover, the patient had almost no significant pain after surgery.  The best part is that in the past, we needed to use a CPM machine to help the patient perform mandatory knee flexion exercises. Now, we hardly use the CPM machine. The patient flexes the knee on his own and is able to exceed the discharge standard of 90 degrees at an early stage.