Content area
Full text
Principles of Deformity Correction
Dror Paley. New York: Springer; 2001. 750 pages. $225.00.
The frontispiece of Nicholas Andry's 1741 monograph entitled L'Orthopedie depicts a seated woman, surrounded by children, holding a yardstick upon which is written haec est regula recti ("this is the standard for alignment"). Indeed, both before and after Andry produced his seminal volume, the rela tionship between lameness and limb deformity was recognized by all who proposed methods for aligning misshapen extremities. As often happened, however, correction of a deformity at one level of a limb failed to completely restore the extremity's biomechanical axis because of an unrecognized malalignment elsewhere in the appendage. Now, 260 years after the publication of Andry's monograph, Dror Paley has written a remarkable book that, perhaps for the first time, permits complete fulfillment of Andry's standard for alignment in the correction of complex limb deformities.
Principles of Deformity Correction evolved from a cours( taught by Paley and his coworkers in Baltimore. The book, which deals exclusively with lower limb deformities, is divide into two parts. The first ten chapters present a step-by-step technique for deformity analysis, starting with the basic concepts of normal and abnormal limb alignment as well as a method for measuring and recording deviations from the norm. Paley has developed a standardized nomenclature for describing deformities that takes into consideration the deviation of a limb's mechanical axis from established norma values as well as the all-important (but often overlooked) joint-orientation angles.
Starting with simple frontal plane malalignment (e.g., varus and valgus) and progressing through deformities in the sagittal and oblique planes, the reader becomes familiar...