PROMOTION
HEALTHCAREW
hen intense pain forced ultramarathoner Jeff
Gleason to drop out halfway through a 135-mile
race, he knew he could no longer rely on ice,
heat, stretches and medication to keep running.
Gleason’s doctor told him the knee replacement he desperately
needed would end his running days. After 40 years and more
than 80,000 miles logged, Gleason wasn’t ready to switch to
biking. Less than three months after a knee replacement with
Dr. Richard A. Berger, a pioneer in tissue-sparing knee and hip
replacement surgery, Gleason ran a half-marathon with ease.
Eighteen months after surgery, Gleason ran a 100-miler.After the ultramarathon—the Harbison 100 in Columbia,
South Carolina—Gleason’s new knee felt like the rest of his
body, sore but not incredibly painful.“After any ultra, you feel like somebody beat you with a
baseball bat,” Gleason, who hails from Pittsburgh, said. “Yourthighs are sore from the pounding you take for 20 hours. My
knee hurt, but it hurt just like everything else. It didn’t hurt like
I have a bad knee.”That’s Dr. Berger’s goal: to get patients’ joints back to their
old days before arthritis added pain and subtracted function
in their hips and knees. Since 2001, Dr. Berger, an assistant
professor at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, has
performed more than 20,000 knee and hip replacements,
including 12,000 as outpatient surgeries.What sets these surgeries apart is Dr. Berger’s tissue-spar-
ing technique. Traditional knee replacements involve cutting
muscles, ligaments and tendons, which then heal with scar tis-
sue that decreases function. This traumatized soft tissue also
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explained. The patient’s new knee must bend to gain function
and range of motion, but the damaged muscles, ligaments andBy K.H. QueenBACK
ON
THE
TRAILS
How A Knee Replacement Kept
This Ultramarathoner Running
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