Bones have the capacity of healing itself, most bone fractures can be treated and healed with the right care. But we cannot measure all the bone fractures in equal terms. Some fractures can get fatal. One such fracture is the hip fracture.
Symptoms or signs of hip fracture
Some people cannot even be able to stand up right after tripping down or falling down due to an accident. These people will have high levels of pain in the hip region. Their legs cannot even be able to bear their own body weight. Even a slight movement can trigger unbearable pain. These symptoms or signs indicate the person could have fractured his hips. It can be detected using X-ray tests.
Who is more vulnerable?
Hip fractures are quite common among old age people. Main reasons for this includes diseases that are quite common among old age people, this includes bad eyesight, diabetes, high blood pressure, dizziness, osteoporosis etc. When hip bones start to lose its strength due to increase in the number of pores in its honeycomb-like construction, even a little accident could lead to hip fracture.
Understanding Hip Joints
Before we get into hip fracture we must first understand the structure and placement of hip joints. Imagine a ball inside a cup. It’s exactly how our top or neck part of the thigh bone is connected to the hip bones. Head part of the thigh bone is called the Femoral head. The femoral neck is a part that connects the femur or thigh bone with its head.
When there is a fracture in the femoral neck region, blood flow to the ball like part gets disturbed. For this joint replacement surgery is carried out to remove the ball like structure. If this ball like structure gets out of its place due to osteoporosis. It will be necessary to remove and replace the whole hip region. This treatment is called as total hip replacement surgery.
Just before 30 to 40 years in the past, there has been a treatment called traction, that is carried out to cure this same problem without any surgery. But for this, the patients need to be in the bed for a period of six weeks without any body movement. But this led to many other complications and diseases which increased the number of casualties.
Now surgery is the most common and best advice for these patients. Patients would be able to stand up and start their walking practice in just a couple of days after a successful surgery.
To avoid future complications in these patients, and to protect them from falling down again, there are certain changes in their home, which is usually advised by doctors, such as placing a handle to hold on to in toilets, using beds with right height levels, using dim light levels in bedrooms as opposed to keeping it completely dark etc. These little changes will help older people, and also other hip fractured patients from not tripping down again.
