Surgical treatment for Achilles tendon injury.

Can you tell us what the advantages are of performing surgery on athletes? Yeah, so you don't have to be a professional athlete to have surgery but you need to have some sort of athletic ability which I think will help because the risk of surgery is significant. There's a high risk of wound complications. Let me just show you an example. Right so this the incision is usually at the back, but I mean there are newer techniques I will describe later, but traditionally the incisions at the back, and there's not much Muscle or fat in this area to protect the tendon and therefore if there is a problem with the wound Then the tendon would become exposed and there's a very high chance that you're going to need lots of revision surgery so that's the biggest risk of having surgery but the advantage of having surgery is that the strength the push-off strength which is the strength that a sprinter would use is stronger so if we don't do surgery we lose about 10% of our push-off strength if we do surgery we retain most of that and the re-ruptured rate is also lower if we do surgery and so without surgery the rupture re-rupturates about 8% and with surgery probably goes down to about 3% 2%. I mean these figures are very interchangeable there's new research coming out all the time and the trend I would say over the last few years is that we try to treat more people without an operation because we use newer techniques new rehab which actually means that the strength and re-rectal rate is less without an operation however on the flip side of that people have started doing surgery through a minimal incision and therefore we have been able to reduce the wound complications I'll just see if I can find a picture of this so this is a new technique where we just use a small incision just from the side and we have a special device which allows us to pass the sutures through and therefore that decreases the risk of infection so in summary I would say that there are advantages and disadvantages of both to an athlete or to any member of the public who wants to discuss surgery but overall the trend nowadays would be towards non-invasive treatments such as you know treating a boot.