Coping with Shortness

Adding a few inches more to one’s height, is really a dream for most short statured individuals. A Sharjah-based orthopaedic surgeon promises just that. “A individual can add six much more inches to his height through this purely cosmetic surgery,” says Dr Shoiab Farooq, a specialist Orthopaedic Surgeon at Al Zahra Hospital in Sharjah. And as the saying goes, beauty comes at a cost. The lengthening process is painful, time consuming and costly too. “A human bone grows 1 millimetre each day,” says the physician. “So if we want inches, we require time.” The application of shoe lifts is a painless and immediate solution. Sawing and cutting through the outer cortex from the bone and making a fracture-like state from the leg, the process consists of stretching of the bone to provide it space to grow. The stretched bones are then held by a wired exterior frame that is kept in location until the new bone grows, occasionally even for as much as 4 months. A patient can move about within days after the surgery though using the frames attached. To attain the entire of six inches, a total of 4 surgeries on each the legs are required,” says Dr Shoaib. Each surgery provides a length of about two and two and half inches. “The surgeries need to be carried out beneath the knees also as on the thigh bones of each leg.” So why would people want to mess with nature? “For boys less than 5 feet 6 or girls shorter than five feet, it's a psychological issue. In some cases, models need such surgeries simply because they're just a couple of inches brief of the needed height,” says the physician. Leg-lengthening was initial performed in the 1950s in the former Soviet Union, after which in China, but with sometimes catastrophic results. The surgery is non-invasive and is a new technological advancement in orthopaedic corrective surgeries. A comparable technique has been created by a Chinese doctor Bai Helong who has currently provided the gift of height to about three,000 individuals. However, Dr Shoaib has just moved to the UAE from Saudi Arabia and is awaiting a management choice on fixing a price for the surgery. “The metal frames and osigraft, a granular powder protein that fills the space while the bone grows to stop infection are each expensive,” says the surgeon who has carried out a number of such surgeries within the UK. A post operative cosmetic surgery to remove the scars may also be required based on the length required. “We sometimes combine the exterior frame and rod for the therapy and sometimes we have to fix internal nails to hold the bone together,” he explains. “If the length is long, then we need the frame to remain in longer and this may leave scars that need a cosmetic repair,” he adds. The surgeon, nevertheless, says that because the process is largely non-invasive, the danger of infection is low. Individuals under therapy need relaxing and stretching workouts to move their immobile muscles. The surgeon has utilized exactly the same method to right a number of birth and development deformities as well give a lease at life to accident victims.