For quite a while now, the commentators here at DefectiveJoints.com have been following the continuing problems of Johnson & Johnson’s Depuy Orthopaedics division, which makes medical device implants. 
Last August, Johnson & Johnson issued a recall of its Depuy ASR hip implant due to continuing reports of the faulty nature of the defective replacement. Since then, the copany has faced a growing number of problems.
There has been a marked decline in the value of J&J stock. The president of Depuy Orthopaedics, David Floyd, has announced his resignation. And patients across the country have filed over 600 lawsuits based on injuries caused by the faulty Depuy hip implants.
But the story of those patients who have been injured by these defectively manufactured hip replacements has gone largely untold. This is why I was so happy to come across a recent news report out of Minnesota highlighting the patients’ side of this story. Here’s an excerpt.
Chances are you or someone you know is going to be a candidate for joint replacement. How much will you know about the device that’s surgically implanted in your body? Well, let’s just put it this way, it might be easier to track the performance record of the parts that go in your car.
For most of his 43 years Pat Ross has been a sports junkie. He was a football player, wrestler and baseball player. It’s been hard on his body. All those years of competition finally caught up with him.
He says, “I was in pain. I had no mobility”
But the fix, like a linebacker blitz, left him in a world of hurt. Ross told us, “I’d be bending over to tie a pair of skates and it felt like I had a red hot spear going into my rear end.”
Ross, like nearly a million Americans, every year had surgery for a joint replacement. The metal hip implant was supposed to last 15 years or more. Less than a year after the surgery he was having trouble moving and was hurting big time. He had no idea what was wrong until he got a letter from his doctor that he might want to come in for an exam.
He says, “It’s incredibly frustrating.”
X-rays showed his new joint was junk. He had to have another surgery to install new parts. Any surgery can be risky.
Laurie Mantueffel’s been there, done that. Less than a year after getting her new hip it went bad. Metal started flaking off the implant. It got into her blood stream causing swelling and pain. She had two surgeries in a year and that wasn’t the end of it. A second operation to fix the problem hip put her in the hospital for four days. When she went home she developed complications.
Mantueffel says, “My whole body had kind of swollen up, my arms, my hands, my feet, and real black and blue.”
Mantueffel was rushed to the emergency room. “I was extremely dizzy, just felt like I wanted to die.”
She was suffering from a dangerous staph infection that triggered pneumonia. She says it nearly killed her.
“I had been bleeding internally and didn’t even know it.”
The report goes on to explain that even before Mantueffel got her first hip implant in late 2008, the Food and Drug Administration had received over 400 complaints of problems caused by the defective Depuy ASR hip implants. By the time Depuy recalled the faulty hip replacement, it had been used in more than 100,000 surgeries.
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