Home physiotherapy in Thane for post-surgery recovery — Ghodbunder Road societies, early discharge and the first six weeks after a knee replacement

Thane has good hospitals and the surgical side of things is generally handled well. What has changed over the last decade is the length of stay. A knee replacement that once meant eight or ten days in a hospital bed now commonly means discharge on day three, sometimes day two. The surgery is the same; the rehabilitation has simply moved out of the ward and into the flat, and that shift is where families get caught out.

In hospital, somebody came twice a day, moved the joint, checked the wound and made you walk whether you felt like it or not. At home, on day four, with the family working and the patient sore, that structure vanishes. The most common thing I see in Thane is not a badly performed operation. It is a well-performed operation followed by three weeks of under-dosed movement, arriving at the six-week review with a knee that will not bend past eighty-five degrees.

Range of movement in the first six weeks after a knee replacement is the part that is genuinely time-sensitive. Strength can be built up at nine months. Extension and flexion are much harder to recover once scar tissue has matured, and a knee that has not reached around ninety degrees of flexion by six weeks may end up being discussed for a manipulation under anaesthesia. That is the specific reason I push early rehabilitation harder than patients often expect, and it is worth understanding rather than just being told.