When people have bad knee joints, doctors often try medications and physical therapy before turning to joint replacement surgery. Now new technology has made surgery and recovery much easier for both the doctor and the patient.

WWL-TV

Without this new technology, artificial joints would be prone to faster wear and tear in up to 30% of all cases.

Cindy Kelley, 48, looks and feels like a brand new person for many reasons. She took off 200 pounds in the last two years with gastric bypass surgery. And although extra weight has been known to damage knee joints, that's not what happened to Cindy; she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis 10 years ago.

“…Feeling like I had flu symptoms, pain in my knees, constantly swelling in my fingers and my joints, and my hands,” Kelley said.

This genetic autoimmune disease causes your own body to attack its own joints.

Kelley said here knees were almost stuck, to a point where they would not straighten out.

“Even though she is relatively young, this is an active individual who was totally disabled and she had the knees of someone in their 70s or 80s,” said Dr. Rick Meyer, Touro orthopedic surgeon.

Two years ago, Cindy had her left knee replaced by Meyer.

“The pain that I experienced from the surgery was nowhere near the pain that I had been experiencing from the rheumatoid, so to recover from that was a piece of cake really,” Kelley said.

However, two months ago, when it came time for Cindy to have her right knee done, Dr. Meyer had something else to offer: surgery with a computer that helps the doctor put the new metal and plastic joint in nearly the exact right spot.

In the past, doctors had to use their eyes and experience to get the joint close to the right spot. Now, infrared cameras in the operating room pick up signals from the knee and generate a 3-D model duplication. The surgeon can now get the knee within half a millimeter of the right spot.

“With a computer we no longer have to do a lot of the drilling and reaming to put in these old instruments and because of that we don't have as much bleeding as we used to have, so healing should be quicker there should be less pain,” Meyer said.

Without the computer, the knee would not in the exact right spot between 20% and 30% of the time, causing the artificial joint to wear out much faster.

“Knees that are in good alignment that have used some of the better components such as the rotating platform have been in over 20 years now,” Meyers said.

Healing has also been much faster and easier, according to Keller.

“…Within the first week I was walking without my walker and being able to do the steps a little bit and by the second week I was walking my dog on around the block,” she said.

Touro Hospital is performing computer assisted knee replacement while the West Jefferson Medical Center handles similar procedures for the hips as well as the knees.