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I've had an ongoing knee problem for years -all of my adult life. It originally started with an injury I inflicted on myself in a motorbike accident when I tore a few ligaments and did a bit of cartilage damage. I've had six operations on it and none of them could be considered a success. The last time they operated on it was going to be my third reconstruction but when I woke from the operation I was handed what was left of my cartilage in a jar and informed that I would never walk again. I told the doctor to get fucked and got up and walked out, it was possibly the most painful thing I've ever done but there was no way I was going to let a quack point his bone me. I managed to keep it functional with a rather intense physio program of my own design. I was referred to the hospital physio, but they didn't understand the mechanics of the problem and suggested I do heaps of quadriceps work to strengthen the joint. I told them I already had much stronger quadriceps than most because of my cycling history (I was doing up to 1000 kms a week at that stage on a pushbike. This didn't fit with their dogma , the good books must all recommend the same (wrong) treatment for my type of condition and I had many arguments with firstly the physiotherapist in charge of my case and then head of the physio dept. and finally with almost the entire panel of orthopedic surgeons from my local hospital. I challenged them to a 50 dollar bet that I could prove they were wrong if they'd put me on the Kin-com dynamometer that was gathering dust in the physio room. They finally relented (they wouldn't take the bet though) and put me on the machine and tested my quadriceps and hamstring strength and it showed that my quadriceps strength was almost 15 % higher over the entire functional range than it was in good knee. This had them puzzled and they just couldn't comprehend how my knee could have such instability with strength levels they witnessed via the Kin-com. It wasn't rocket science so I told them to test my functional strength on hamstring contraction and it showed that my hamstrings had less than 30% of the of the output in watts than my good knee - as I'd insisted all along. After a conference of educated idiots, they decided to redesign a program to increase my hamstring strength, but I told them to get fucked too. Many of these people don't even have the slightest mechanical aptitude at all and that's all it comes down to - mechanics, not this elusive bullshit they call medicine and use to put themselves on a pedestal above the common man. I've managed to live with it all these years fairly well but recently it's come to a head. I injured it again a few weeks back and now it's unstable to the point where walking has become a luxury. It's been dislocating almost every day and each night when I try to sleep. When I roll over in bed just the weight of the sheet is enough to stop my foot from rolling over with me and it completely dislocates my knee. I'm not talking about a kneecap dislocation, this a complete dislocation where the tib and fib move sideways about 90 mm and get stuck there. It's done a bit of nerve damage and chipped a few chunks of bone off inside the joint, so basically it's fucked. It looks like I have two options - Joint replacement or amputation. I really don't want to let anyone put crap like that in my body and I had a crazy idea that if I hold out long enough biotech/stem cell technology might be able to help re-grow the cartilage and ligaments/tendons ect. Even if biotech methods are available, I can't see the public health system shelling out for anything like. So the first two options are what I'm left with. So after that long boring rant. I want to know if anyone here has or knows of anyone with a replacement knee. I really don't like the idea of letting someone chop a large part of my anatomy away and replace it with metal and plastic shit, but it looks I don't have much choice. I'm particularly interested experiences with the public hospital system, I know there are some brilliant surgeons out there, it's the amateurs that work for the public health system that have me worried.