Celebrity orthopaedics: Paul Stanley

Post THR exercise routine

One of my occasional pleasures is seeing how once youthful rockers grow old, get ill etc. I remember a picture of Rod Stewart coming out of a New York pharmacy clutching a large box of anti-inflammatories. A few weeks ago we had Joe Perry with his walking stick.

Well, here's Paul Stanley (65 last month), the guitarist with the star on his face from Kiss. He's an orthopaedic case history:

"What I do has taken its toll. I've had both my rotator cuffs surgically repaired. They're all similar to sport injuries. I've torn my meniscus in both knees and had a hip replacement. This is all from onstage performances. It's like doing a triathlon with a guitar around my neck. You have to jump, sing, swing your arm and play the right chord. With that combination, anything can go wrong. I used to jump up in the air and land on my knees. It didn't hurt then, but it does now."

He was 52 when he had his hip done. Last year he had a torn biceps fixed, with all the vital technical details:

Not only that, he identified the difficulty deciding whether to undergo a hip replacement in a tweet after bandmate Gene Simmons was critical following Prince's OD on analgesics for his hip disease (keep up):

As he said about his own decision:

"I wound up postponing my hip surgery and, you know, it's like reading in the newspaper your own death, you know, when you keep reading about your hip surgery, and I haven't done it, but I'm just postponing it for awhile. I have, you know, every intention of continuing doing what I've been doing, but little by little I'm turning bionic."

Interestingly Paul did have a complication - recurrent dislocation. Money can't guarantee that you avoid it. When I did private medicine I always felt my complication rate was slightly higher in the private sector. . It would be interesting to know what the salvage procedure was, because he looks like he's functioning at a pretty high level. Although...

"You know things did not go as well as they could have or perhaps should have. Hip replacement is major surgery yet it's fairly routine. It's done so often. The actual procedure has changed so much that you basically have the surgery and are walking that day. But there's a saying, minor surgery is what somebody else is having. This clearly was not minor surgery and the first one did not go well and kept pulling out or dislocating almost immediately. So within two months I went back and had it done again, which seemed to fix one problem and start others. The recovery has taken way longer and been more painful than I expected. It will never be great."


And that fits with the evidence that although patient satisfaction after dislocation soon catches up - if the hip is stabilised - the functional scores are frequently less than in the uncomplicated hip arthroplasty. 

I'm not a huge fan of Kiss, though I kind of like the whole trashy metal showbiz thing. Here they are in 2014. That's a 10 year old revision hip in a 62 year old you're looking at. Not bad.