I'm an arthroscopic surgeon and I specialize in shoulder and knee arthroscopy at Holy Family Hospital. So let me give you just a brief on what arthroscope is. Autoscopy is basically we operate with very small incisions, they called stab incisions or in our language, they're called portals. So what happens next, when you want to see the shoulder joint or the knee joint, through a small portal we just place in the camera so once you place in the camera you are able to go all around the joint into the tight spots. We have special lenses were with particular degrees like 30 degrees and 70 degrees. So we are able to see all around the knee as we are looking when we do an open procedure. So through subsequent portals or stab incisions, we can perform the surgery. Through one portal we see the joint either the shoulder, the knee and in the subsequent portal, we perform the surgery.
What are the advantages of arthroscopy? well first. It's basically these surgeries performed to only stab incisions. So the healing is fast and the pain is less because there's less soft tissue dissection and the recovery is faster and the hospital stay is significantly reduced. So typically we discharge patients the next day. Suppose we operating a patient today, he gets home the next day and the other advantages of arthroscopy are that you can make a thorough diagnosis because you are looking right inside, and certain procedures where it becomes easier arthroscopic than open for example meniscus repairs where it's very difficult to open but it's much easier to do it Autoscopically.
Let me just tell you what procedures we usually do in arthroscopic in our Institute that is Holy Family Hospital. When it comes to the shoulder, the common complaints, they complain of pain while lifting the arm, some patients complain that they can't lift the arm at all even if you need to hold it with the good arm, these are called rotator cuff tears. What happens is that the windows rotator cuff tear, the joint is jeopardized so once you go on with your arthroscope, you can make the diagnosis and repair the rotator cuff and then the joint is just restored because if you don't prepare the rotator cuff then over a period of time it leads to arthritis of the shoulder. So that's one common procedure which we do here.
The next procedure which we do is, some patients complain of pain again by lifting the arm at a particular angle and that's solar impingement, so you have a bone what we call it a spore coming from the bone on top of the shoulder and hits the ball, so when the spore contacts the ball, the patient complains of pain. So we can do a small procedure which we call the subacromial decompression. Maybe we just remove that spore. It takes just about half out of 45 minutes and that it's done.
Another common procedure is for shoulder dislocations. What we call an arthroscopic bankcards repair. So again the recovery time is significantly less because the surgeries performed to just three incisions. The patient can go home the next day and there is faster recovery because there is less pain and physiotherapy is more easier to perform. These are just some of the procedures for the shoulder and of course, there are many more which there's no time to elaborate that much and when it comes to the knee, the common procedure we perform here is a meniscus repair. The meniscus is a structure which is of vital importance in the knee for the normal loading of the knee. So we repair the meniscus and also patients come with symptoms of instability typically after a sports injury or after traffic accident so you can have an instability of the knee in the forward plane or on the backward plane. If it is a forward plane that may perform what we call is an ACL reconstruction or anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction and if the knee is unstable in the posterior in the backward plane, then we do what we call is a PCL reconstruction or posterior cruciate ligament reconstruction. Apart from that we also perform a lot of surgeries for patients with rheumatoid arthritis, who are refractory to treatment. We do something called a signatory. Where we remove the bad tissue and thereby get relief. We can even remove loose bodies, so these are some of the procedures that we do here in this Holy Family Hospital institute in shoulder knee arthroscopy.