New type of hip replacement surgery is helping active people under 60

Orthopedic surgeon Gene Lopez of Midwest Sports Medicine in Elk Grove Village and Schaumburg features photos of pro cyclist Floyd Landis hanging in his waiting rooms.

Not for his cycling career, but for his orthopedic recovery. For Lopez's patients, Landis is the poster boy for a relatively new hip resurfacing procedure, and its ability to restore patients to full mobility.

"The procedure does so well," Lopez says "that it gives you essentially a normally functioning hip."

Landis underwent the Birmingham Hip Resurfacing near the end of 2006, and within two months, colleagues say, he was back on his bike, resuming his training. They figure that since his implant, he has logged more than 20,000 miles on the bike.

Largely seen as an alternative to full hip replacement, the procedure has been done in Europe for 12 years, where Dr. Ronan Treacy at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham, England, is viewed as the resident expert.

Lopez studied under Treacy, and he now does one of the largest volumes of hip resurfacing procedures in the Midwest.

The procedure caps or resurfaces the hip joint with an all-metal implant of a metal ball inside a metal socket. Consequently, it preserves most of the hip bone, Lopez says, leading to its success and increased mobility in patients.

In addition to Landis, Lopez points to one of his own high visibility patients, Arlington Heights native Bob Riefke, who caddies for a variety of players on the PGA Tour, and underwent the procedure last year.

"I was going to quit," says Riefke, 49. "I couldn't get around the golf course any more."

He followed up his surgery with aggressive physical therapy, packing six months of working out into four, allowing him to resume the tour. It paid off, he says, when he caddied for golfer Omar Uresti, who won the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro Am in February.

"This allowed him to resume his career," Lopez says. "Imagine, carrying a 50-pound bag, while walking up and down those hills for 18 holes. It's incredibly grueling."

Lopez says that every day, patients like Riefke walk into his office, in their 30s, 40s and 50s with debilitating hip pain, commonly caused by hip arthritis, dysplasia, or complications from an accident.

"It's only indicated for people under 60 who are active, have good bone quality and don't have too much hip deformity," Lopez says.

Often, he adds, he sees marathon runners who have degenerative hip pain, and he finds the Birmingham Hip Resurfacing procedure suits them well.

"We're sort of conservative," Lopez says. "In my practice, we don't suggest returning to marathon distance racing, but shorter, less high impact runs are fine."

Cycling, he adds, is the perfect therapy for exercising the muscles around the resurfaced joint.