Surgery – Body protecting or restraining devices for patients or infants – Restrainers and immobilizers
Patent
1993-06-23
1995-05-02
Brown, Michael A.
Surgery
Body protecting or restraining devices for patients or infants
Restrainers and immobilizers
602 23, 602 26, 602 62, 602 63, A61F 537, A61F 500
Patent
active
054110378
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to an elastic knee joint bandage in a tubular form with an elastic profile insert encircling the knee cap in an opening.
Similar knee joint bandages are disclosed by German Patent 3,412,772. This bandage includes a profile insert partly encircling the knee joint on both sides with extension flaps. Reinforcements are incorporated in the extension flaps. These reinforcements are used to exert radial pressure on the knee joint from both sides. In another embodiment described in the publication, the profile insert is provided with a toroidal elevation near the opening for the knee cap which also increases the pressure on the knee at its position. As stated in the associated description, this is intended to make it possible to move the knee cap both inward and toward the outside of the knee. Therefore, a static action of the pressure exerted by the elevation on the knee is utilized.
An elastic knee joint bandage is also described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,445,505 that has an opening for the knee cap and in which pads are disposed in a position so as to prevent lateral shifting of the knee cap. To intensify the action of these pads, the knee joint bandage is provided with elastic bands that can be stretched around the bandage by means of conventional fabric-based hook and eye closures, which hold the pads in place. Therefore, this knee joint bandage also involves acting on the knee cap position by exerting static pressure.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The purpose of this invention is to provide a bandage that acts dynamically on a knee cap that has moved laterally to the side of the fibular and out of its ideal position either pathologically or as a very frequent variant from the norm, and thereby to correct the position of the knee cap. This is accomplished pursuant to the invention by connecting the areas of the profile insert adjacent to the poles of the knee cap by a flexible, unstretchable tension member placed in the curve around the knee cap on the side of the fibula in the profile insert in such a way that when the distance between these areas increases as the knee joint is flexed, the distance of the curve from the line joining the poles of the knee cap is reduced and the edge of the opening of the profile insert on the adjacent side of the knee cap presses it medially with a shifting and centering action.
When the knee joint is flexed, this knee joint bandage is stretched considerably on the front over the knee cap. This stretching is transferred to the profile insert, which is an integral part of the knee joint bandage, so that the areas of the profile insert that are adjacent to the poles of the knee cap are moved away from one another compared to the extended position of the knee joint. Because of this enlargement of distance, traction is exerted on the ends of the tension member so that its central area is drawn to the side of the knee cap. The edge of the opening in the profile insert containing the tension member thereby exerts lateral pressure on the knee cap, which is thus drawn increasingly to the knee cap with the flexing of the knee. This results in a dynamic process in which motion of the knee cap that is otherwise possible without the bandage of the invention is counteracted to the same extent as the tendency toward improper motion of the knee cap. Specifically, the more the knee joint is flexed to an angle of about 90.degree., the greater is the tendency toward improper shifting, which is counteracted fully by the tension member because of correspondingly increasing lateral pressure on the knee cap.
Since the knee cap never usually shifts toward the inside functionally or anatomically with a stressed femoral musculature, but rather only toward the outside, the only meaningful correction addresses the knee cap slipping toward the outside and produces a central positioning of the knee cap. In motion, the lateral pressure exerted by the tension member, which acts on the knee cap through a layer of soft tissue, when using the bandage pursuant to the
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Bauerfeind Hans B.
Hess Heinrich
Krause Wolfgang
Bauerfeind GmbH & Co.
Brown Michael A.
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