Dr P Suryanarayana: Orthopedic Surgeon – India

”Hi, am Dr Suryanarayanan, I am an orthopedic surgeon. I have been in practice for almost 20 years now.

Previously our focus was on trauma, then I started doing reconstrucive joint surgeries. We have been doing that for almost 15 years. We find many patients coming for revision surgeries. They constitute almost 30% of our cases.

I graduated from the University of Bombay. I did my masters degree in orthopedics. And then I have had specialty trainings mostly in Fellowships. I did my [specialist training in] joint replacement surgery [through fellowship] at the Hospital for Specialist Surgery, New York City, which is a center reputed for joint replacements. I spent some time at the hip unit in Nuremberg, Switzerland. I also trained for hip and knee in Germany.

Apart from these three major things, my other stint was in Hong Kong at the Chinese University, where my focus was bone banking, which I have started here, too.

The more revision surgeries you do, the more is the need for a bone bank.

But in the last 5-6 years, I have been doing many visitations abroad, like to Australia. Yesterday, I got back from Japan. We do it twice-thrice a year. So, it’s a good exchange of information.

For international patients, I have mostly handled knee replacement. I have been doing unicondylar knee replacement, that is, partial knee replacement. About 15% of patients are qualified for this surgery, when the damage is restricted to one half of the knee.

This is a procedure which is not so popular in the US, but is popular in the European continent. The unicondylar knee replacement surgery is popular for two reasons: one, it preserves all the function [of the knee] and two, why take on something that’s not damaged – that is my philosophy.

From the African continent and from the middle-eastern countries, [we get a lot of patients for] revision surgery.

To cut a long story short, we do about 300 joint replacement procedures in a year.”