Will hip resurfacing be a renaissance in ceramic or just another fad?

It worked for Andy Murray, so why isn’t hip resurfacing offered to more people as an alternative to the replacement? Orthopaedic surgeon Steven Cutts explains

(Getty/The Independent)

All my life, I’ve wanted a British player to win the Wimbledon men’s singles final. When I was very young, I remember Christopher “Buster” Mottram playing. He was England’s number one player who reached 15th in the world in 1983 – but he never won Wimbledon. Instead, for most of my life, usually when it came to the final, a couple of foreign players would stroll on to court and the audience would politely applaud before the pair did battle for the title.

Then, after a 76-year hiatus, Andy Murray made us proud. It looked like we finally had a player in the top four when – quite suddenly – he started to develop hip arthritis. In another age, he might have been forced to give it all up but this was the early 21st century and Murray decided to take his chances on the operating table. Better than that, he asked a prominent London surgeon to give him a “Birmingham Hip Resurfacing”. It worked, and Murray is still in the game.

Is he still going to be grateful in 10 years’ time? Well, maybe that’s a question for another day, but it does illustrate what kind of result can be achieved – albeit in a performance athlete – using the hip resurfacing concept, and, incredibly, hip resurfacing as we know it today was actually pioneered in this country. So how then can the world of orthopaedics offer this same technology to a broader spectrum of patients?