Medicine: Cellophane for Joints

Stiff knee? Arthritis? Get a surgeon to open you up and wrap the joints in cellophane. That is just what they’re doing at California’s Long Beach Naval Hospital. A surgeon there, Lieut. Commander Duncan Clark McKeever, reported last week that he had loosened up some 20 stiff joints with cellophane surgery.

One treatment for arthritic knees is to remove the lining of the knee joints. But scar tissue that forms afterwards usually makes the joint surfaces stick together, causing stiffness that is often only partly relaxed by a slow, painful course of exercises. Surgeon McKeever thought that if he capped the sliding surfaces of the joints with a smooth material, he might prevent scar tissue adhesion, keep the surfaces moving freely.

He first tried it three years ago on a young woman patient in Houston who had been bedfast six years with arthritic swellings in both knees. He removed the knee linings and covered the joints with pieces of non-waterproof cellophane from a shirt wrapping (waterproof cellophane, such as cigarets are wrapped in, is no good: its lacquer coating would irritate). Reopening one knee a few weeks later, he found the cellophane still there, flexible and intact, left it there. His patient, regaining limberness in both knees, took up dancing.

After that, Surgeon McKeever operated similarly and successfully on other civilians. Since joining the Navy he has used cellophane on elbows, finger joints, hand joints, even between muscle layers and around tendons. He now believes that cellophane can be used in many kinds of operations to prevent adhesion of two surfaces.