No! There is no possibility that you can reduce your particular height with the help of a surgery. There is presently a surgery for shortening the bone and yes it might reduce your height, but that isn’t why it is done. Bone shortening surgery is mainly done to reduce the length of your leg or amend bones that are not placed evenly.
Introduction
We have seen issues where limbs aren’t evened out as you grow. In some cases, it’s the arms that are uneven, one of the arms is longer than the other.
It also happens on the leg too, your leg may be a few millimeters shorter than another.
Although as time goes on, there is a probability that pairs of bones are likely to have a mild length difference.
When it affects your arms, you might not find it to be an issue but when it affects the legs, it could cause serious difficulty with the way you move, and most times it leads to pain.
You know how we humans are, it is when the pain has become unbearable or just as the pain arrives, that is when they consider treatment.
This is where bone reduction surgery comes in, although it is not supposed to be the first choice for issues like this.
However, this is what. We know, bone reduction surgery can help to amend the differences in the length of your limb which then helps the patient walk and move more comfortably.
What Procedures Are Passed Through?
There are two kinds of surgery that can be performed to reduce the length of the leg bone.
You could go ahead with anyone through the advice of your surgeon who would choose one for you based on your age and the result you aim at getting.
Epiphysiodesis
This is mainly surgical destruction of the plates at the end of your bones to stop them from growing.
As you advance in age, the growth plates develop a bone material that becomes very strong.
As the surgery takes place, what the surgeon does is to scrape or drill holes inside those growth plates so as make sure they don’t expand or just casually slow the growth down.
The surgeon sometimes puts places a metal plate that goes around the growth plate to make sure additional bone isn’t developed.
Limb Shortening Surgery
Another procedure is known as the limb shortening surgery. The name explains this one very well, the surgery is done to reduce the length of a bone that might cause your overall height to be reduced.
For this to be done, the surgeon would have to take out some parts of the femur or tibia and afterward use a metal plate to keep the remaining parts of the bone together so they can undergo a healing process.
The healing process after this takes a long time, several weeks and sometimes a couple of months. This may even cause you to have very limited movements.
In most cases, a full length leg cast is made for you so you could reduce your movements until your doctor says it is okay to take it out.
You know what? Come to think of it, there is a maximum height that could be taken of your bones, for example, the femur can only take be reduced by 3 inches while the tibia can only take out 2 inches.
The length taken out would depend on the problem that the surgeon is trying to treat.
Bone Shortening And Lengthening Surgery
The surgeries people undergo for bone shortening are commonly used when treating issues like Limb Length Discrepancy (LLD).
An LLD is a visible difference between the length of a person’s limb. The difference could be so obvious because the distance is much, maybe a few inches. It is worst when it happens to your leg.
For numerous years or months, a person who suffers from this discrepancy might be able to live with the difference in length in his or her limbs.
Although, as time goes on, side effects start to show up and issues like pain and walking difficulties. It might even start to affect your athletic abilities.
Bone shortening surgeries are made to decrease the differences in the length of your limbs.
The most common surgeries are done on leg lines, on some occasions do they perform this surgery on the arms that are visibly different.
If this occurs on your hands, you could live with it, it is totally insignificant to undergo surgery for that.
For your legs, you undergo a surgery that would definitely reduce your height by a few inches.
On the other side, bone lengthening surgeries are done to improve the length of a shorter bone. This could also be good to remove uneven limb lengths but will not reduce the person’s height.
How Do You Diagnose Leg Length Discrepancies
The difference in a child’s leg length might begin to show when the child starts learning to walk.
Sometimes when the child goes through the normal screening at school, the discrepancy might be noticed then too.
Before being diagnosed, the doctor would have to examine the child’s health and its medical past.
What happens next is that they hold a physical examination that has to do with watching the way the child moves and takes its steps.
To manage the difference in leg length, children tend to use the toe of the shorter leg to walk or some cases bend the knees of the longer leg.
To figure out what the difference is between both legs, the doctor puts wooden blocks under the shorter leg until the hips are staged at an equal line.
Since the child is still at a growing stage, most doctors would advise that the child should be under surveillance to see if the leg difference increases or stays as it were.
To monitor the growth, the doctor might advise an annual check-up to make sure he is the one keeping track of what is happening.