Find out how flawed measurements of improvement in hip surgery patients make hip surgery seem like a great idea.

Resources:

Harris Hip Score
Arthroscopic Femoroplasty in the Management of Cam-type Femoroacetabular Impingement

Transcript:
Hey, everybody! This is Matt Hsu from Upright Health and welcome to Episode 15 of the Upright Health Podcast. Today, I am looking at something called the Harris Hip Score. And we're looking at that in the context of hip surgery for people who Femoroacetabular Impingement nerve who have been given the diagnosis of FAI. I’ve talked in depth about this in videos and online in many different formats. I believe that this diagnosis is one of basically illusory misplaced faith in diagnostic imaging, and then you pile surgery on top of that and you leave people in a pretty terrible lurch.

So I have been getting a lot of comments and emails from people who have been doing those stretches and taking a different approach to their hip problems and they've been seeing marked improvements. And I really appreciate your sharing those stories with me because it motivates me to continue digging deeper into the research and helping share more information that others can use to first, change their mindset and second, start doing different things like stretching properly, addressing muscle properly, addressing coordination issues properly so that they can start moving their hips better. So for all of all of you who have already sent those messages to me, I really appreciate it. I really enjoy hearing your stories of success and seeing you succeed, really with what can be a really frustrating, painful and stubborn problem.
But in any case, today, we're talking about the Harris Hip Score because it's something that I noticed was referenced in a lot of studies on surgery for hip impingements. So basically, the Harris Hip Score is a questionnaire that's used to determine how healthy your hips are. It's only thirteen questions in its full form. There's a modified version which is a little bit shorter. It takes out a number of questions that have almost no… I mean very little amount of points that they add to your total score and that, you know, from my experience are probably -- from my vantage point anyway – are probably not that effective and useful for assessments, but in any case, it's got thirteen questions in its full form and you can have a total score of 100 points.
The Harris Hip Score is used to determine whether or not surgery is successful. So in order to consider a surgery a success, you are supposed to have improvement in your Harris Hip Score of 20 points. So for example, if I were going to consider surgery for my hips, I would graded using the Harris Hip Score before surgery and after the surgery, I’d follow up, whatever, a couple months down the line, a year down the line, two years down the line. We’d check in and see what my Harris Hip Score is. As long as I'm maintaining a twenty point improvement, it's considered a successful surgery.
So, I'm going to give you a study here to take a look at and it's from March 2009 edition of the clinical orthopedics and related research journal by J. W. Thomas Byrd and Kay S. Jones. What they had was two hundred people with hip problems. A couple of them had more than one hip that was problematic, so they had 207 hips to work on. Average age was thirty three years with a hundred and thirty eight men and sixty two women. They underwent correction of cam impingement, and also forty two patients underwent surgery for cam and pincer impingement. So in this abstract they mentioned that the increase in the Harris Hip Score -- the average increase -- was twenty points. Yes! So, based on the average, pretty successful.
If  we look deeper into the results,