Surgery: splint – brace – or bandage – Orthopedic bandage – Splint or brace
Patent
1998-08-05
2000-03-21
Weiss, John G.
Surgery: splint, brace, or bandage
Orthopedic bandage
Splint or brace
602 6, 602 46, 602 21, 602 22, A61F 500
Patent
active
060397063
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
TECHNICAL FIELD
The present invention concerns the field of medical splints for human and veterinary medicine. It concerns a medical splint for securing or immobilizing movable body parts, in particular extremities of a person or animal along the axis of a splint, where said splint comprises a sheet metal or a plate that can be shaped by hand and is covered on both sides with a covering or cover layer.
Metal splints are not unusual. Such a splint is know, for example, from U.S. Pat. No. 3,943,923.
STATE OF THE ART
Many variations of splints consisting essentially of a metal plate (usually aluminum) that can be shaped easily and is covered on both sides with a cover layer of plastic foam, etc., are known in the state of the art. The splints are usually in the form of flat sheets which, when used, are adapted to the extremities to be splinted by plastic bending, although to a limited extent, to provide the required support and permit the required immobilization. The sheet metal on the inside may then either fill out practically the entire area of the splint, as is the case in U.S. Pat. No. 3,943,923, U.S. Pat. No. 4,676,233 or European Patent No. B1 39,323, or it is embedded in the splint in the form of several reinforcing metal strips, as is the case in European Patent No. B1 73,772.
Simultaneously fulfilling contradictory requirements with such adjustable or shapable splints presents problems: first, the splint must permit plastic deformation or bending with sufficient ease, so that it can be adapted by hand to the extremities (body parts) to be immobilized without any additional aids. Second, however, despite the easy deformability, the splint should be rigid enough to guarantee the required immobilization of the extremities.
To achieve the required stability of the splint, U.S. Pat. No. 4,161,175, for example, has proposed that ribs running back and forth in a straight line in the direction of the splint axis or a sinusoidal pattern be molded into the sheet metal to reinforce it. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,676,233, a similar reinforcement is produced by subsequent bending of a rib running in the axis of the splint.
An even greater problem is that because of the very low extensibility and compressibility [of the sheet metal] in the plane of the sheet at normal forces, it is very difficult to properly shape smooth sheet metal by plastic bending to conform to the irregular and sometimes sharply curved contours of the extremities or body parts to be immobilized or secured. Such shaping is especially difficult when the splint has a large, simply coherent area. This problem is not solved by the previously known splits using sheet metal. Instead, good adaptation to the complex shapes of extremities and body parts has been achieved so far only through traditional plaster splints or thermally molded plastic splints.
DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION
The object of the invention is therefore to create a medical splint that can easily be adapted by hand to the extremities or body parts to be secured by applying very little force starting from the shape of a flat sheet, that will have the required rigidity when shaped and is still flexible in use.
This object is achieved with the splint of the type defined initially by the fact that the sheet metal or plate is designed with corrugations at least in some areas, where the peaks and valleys of the corrugations run essentially across the splint axis.
The core of this invention consists of producing an easy extensibility and compressibility in the plane of the splint through corrugation of the sheet metal, so that the splint can be adapted to local irregularities in the extremities or body parts to be secured without any major problems. If local elongation is required, the corrugations in the sheet metal expands in this area. However, if local compression is necessary, the corrugations become steeper and closer together in this area. The splint thus has an extremely high local deformability. Another important feature of the splint according to this invention is the orientation
REFERENCES:
patent: 2273028 (1942-02-01), Eaton
patent: 2667868 (1954-02-01), Smyth
patent: 3850167 (1974-11-01), Seeley
patent: 4161175 (1979-07-01), Bentele
Bolla Kalman
Bolla Orsolya
Chrisofix AG
Hart Kelvin E
Weiss John G.
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