Knee Replacement

Most knee replacements are planned around the surgery. Dr. Siddiqi plans them around the patient.

A surgery date is not a plan.

Bone-on-bone. It’s the phrase patients hear, and then hear again — usually right before they’re handed a pamphlet and a surgery date. What they are rarely handed is the conversation that should come first: what does this knee look like specifically, what does this patient need from it, and is the body actually ready to recover from what’s about to happen to it?

Dr. Ahmed Siddiqi asks those questions. Every time. Before anything else gets scheduled.

What is Total Knee Replacement?

A total knee replacement removes the damaged surfaces of the joint — the worn cartilage, the bone-on-bone contact — and replaces them with implants designed to restore normal mechanics. The goal isn’t the absence of pain. It’s the return of a life that isn’t organized around a failing knee. Stairs without bracing for them. Sleep that isn’t interrupted. A walk that doesn’t come with a limp.

The surgery takes 30 to 40 minutes. Most of Dr. Siddiqi’s patients go home the same day — not because it’s convenient, but because the surgical protocol, the precision standard, and the pain management approach are specifically built to make it safe and appropriate.

The question nobody else is asking

Before a surgery date is ever discussed, Dr. Siddiqi evaluates a question most pre-operative workups skip entirely: not whether the patient is medically safe to operate on, but whether their biology is in the right condition to recover well. Nutritional status. Inflammation markers. Albumin levels. Variables that are upstream of the outcome — and modifiable, if there’s time to address them.

He has delayed surgeries because a patient’s albumin was too low. Three months later, her labs were right and her recovery looked different. That wasn’t a delay. That was the protocol working exactly as it should.

Half a millimeter.

Half a millimeter is the margin between a knee replacement that performs correctly at year six and one that produces low-grade problems a patient eventually learns to manage. That is not a marketing figure. It is the clinical reality of component positioning in total joint replacement.

Dr. Siddiqi uses robotic assistance in his surgeries because it reduces the positional variability that exists in every surgeon’s hands — including his. He will say that plainly. Most of his peers won’t. The reason isn’t that robotic assistance makes the surgery easier for the surgeon. It’s that it makes the outcome more reliable for the patient.

After the OR is where the work continues.

The surgery is 30 to 40 minutes. The recovery is months. Pain management, nutrition, compression, mobility — the variables that determine how well and how quickly a patient regains function are addressed before the surgery and managed closely after it. Every patient has direct access to Dr. Siddiqi and his team throughout that process. Not a call center. Not a portal with a 48-hour response window. Direct access.

No surprises.

Every patient of Dr. Siddiqi’s knows what’s coming before it arrives. The pre-operative period is used to prepare — medically, biologically, and practically. By surgery day, the anesthesia team has been introduced, the care coordinator has been in touch, and every question has already been answered.

After surgery, the access doesn’t stop. If something feels wrong at 9 p.m. on a Sunday, there is a place to send that message and the certainty that it will be seen.