Hi Folks,

Back in 2000 while stepping up a curb I experienced an incredibly sharp
pain in my left hip. After an MRA I was diagnosed with a labral tear.
About three years later in 2003 the same thing happened in my right
hip. I'm only 31 now in 2005 so I was pretty young to get idiopathic
labral tears.

I never got surgery and moved from San Francisco to Seattle, in the end
I've seen about 8 different MD's for the hip pain. Since searching at
google didn't turn up anything similar to what I had, I thought I would
post in case anyone else is exploring this problem and facing hip
arthroscopy/arthroscopic debridement of the labrum.

Since my first tear in 2000 it looks like there has been some
interesting research done. In particular Dr. Reinhold Ganz in Bern,
Switzerland has written several papers, "Femoroacetabular Impingement:
A Cause for Osteoarthritis of the Hip"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstra
ct&list_uids=14646708&query_hl=1
[PMID: 14646708] in particular that discuss his reasoning behind labral
tears in young adults.

His basic theory is that bony abnormalities case the hip joint to work
incorrectly, slowly destroying the labrum and leading to early
artrhitis of the hip. If you only repair the labral defect and not the
underlying issue you wont be doing much good over the long term.

If you are facing hip arthroscopy/arthroscopic repair of your labrum
and don't have any trauma I would recommend heading to a local college
library and printing out a copy of the paper, I found it fascinating.
I'm lucky in that I found a dr who did his fellowship with Dr. Ganz. He
is Dr. Philip Downer here at Swedish Hospital/Ballard Orthopedic Clinic
here in Seattle,WA. He does the recontouring via hip arthroscopy as
opposed to the open method discussed in the papers by Dr. Ganz.

Why this post? None of my google searches turned up anything about this
other than at pubmed so I thought I would get something out there.

Cheers,
Chris Prosser