Mom's Trip To The Orthepedic Surgeon
Well, today was the day, mom went to the doctor to see if he would give her Synvisc. I told her I had no idea what to expect, we didn't even know if he had ever heard of the product.
A month ago or so I e-mailed BioMatrix and requested they send information on the product directly to my mom's home. Interestingly, it showed up in mom's mail today. She was surprised to get it and read I believe all she could prior to going to the doctor's office. Since he didn't have an x-ray and the last one she'd had taken was at least a year earlier, he had one taken.
Turns out this doctor knew exactly what Synvisc was and was very surprised my mom knew. He was very curious how she came to know so much about it. She lives in a town of 10,000 people. Her doctor practices there and with his partners in a town of maybe 7,500 that is 25 miles away. He said they have already done Synvisc injections on about 20 patients, but she was the first one that came seeking the treatment. He said in all those he'd only had one failure. I ask her what he meant, but she said she didn't know.
My mom claims after reading the literature that came in the mail, she knew what he was going to say before she got to the doctor's office. I think you are all going to be as dumbfounded by what the doctor said as I was.
A few details though. My mom has several different conditions, one being high blood pressure. Not long ago she went to a specialist about that and he put her on some medication that typically might be damaging to her kidneys. He did some type of test to determine that my mom's kidneys were in good shape and he thought there wasn't much risk for her. The medication was to help with pain in her knee and legs in general. I'm so used to hearing my mom complain about pain in her knee and legs in general, I did not know that this particular medicine had supposedly controlled the pain in the knee, although she still has trouble in her legs.
Anyway, my mom says according to the literature she received and according to her doctor, Synvisc is not indicated for a patient that has their pain controlled by any medicine that is not otherwise threatening to the patient's health. Now, all of this is my paraphrase, I've not seen the literature. BTW, the xray revealed that mom's cartilage had not deteriorated much since the last x-ray, perhaps in total she had about 2/3's remaining.
So there you have it. Quite an interesting story. I believe mom said that he had been using a competitor's product prior to Synvisc being approved. Isn't there another product out there that had been approved by the FDA some time ago?
Regards,
James |
