Apollo Hospitals to perform robotic knee, hip replacement surgeries in Nellore

Ongole: An expert doctors' team from Apollo Hospitals in Chennai announced at their consultation facility in Ongole on Saturday that they were starting the robotic arm-assisted knee and hip replacement surgeries at their Nellore branch hospital also.

Addressing a press conference here, the team members announced that the patients from Prakasam district need not visit Chennai, but they can get their surgeries done in Nellore, at relatively low cost.

Dr M Madan Mohan Reddy, senior consultant in orthopaedics, explained that with the robotic arm and using a virtual 3D model, they can make precise bone cuts on the patients, better than in conventional surgery. He said that the patients who underwent the robotic arm-assisted surgery experienced speedy recovery, improved early function, lower post-op pains, less need for analgesics and rated higher satisfaction over the patients who underwent manual surgeries.

Dr Pammi Karthik Reddy, another consultant in orthopaedics, said that the Apollo Hospital in Chennai is the first hospital that introduced robotic arm-assisted knee replacement surgery in South India, and they have performed more than 600 surgeries till now.

He said that as there were a considerable number of patients from the Prakasam district also, they were introducing the surgeries at Apollo Hospital in Nellore for the benefit of the patients from the region. He said that with this method of surgery, they could easily rectify the bend in legs occurring over years of pressure and make them perfect.

The patients who utilised the surgery earlier, Kotireddy, Narasimha Rao, and Venkateswarlu from the Prakasam district explained how they suffered from the pains earlier, and leading a happy life now, after the surgery. They praised the doctors' team and announced to plan for the surgery for the second leg, soon.