Specialties: Orthopedic Surgery, Hip & Knee Replacement

• 25 years experience with over 2000 successful hip & knee replacements (single surgeon).

• Perfected protocols which were established & performed at
  Phelps Memorial Hospital

During the last fifteen years, Dr. Seebacher has devoted his career to the treatment and, if necessary, replacement of arthritic hips and knees.  Supported by his partners and working closely with the highly cooperative hospital administration, sophisticated plans of care were formulated, adopted, learned, and perfected by all the members of a large team of professionals. Their goal was the delivery of safe, reliable and deluxe care to joint replacement patients.  This was comprehensively integrated and adjoined with Phelps’ state certified inpatient rehabilitation unit, one of only a few in the region, to seamlessly combine the acute Orthopedic inpatient hospitalization with intensive inpatient rehabilitation in a single unit of a hospital, under the supervision of a single team of trained professionals. Since 1998, well over one thousand of these operations were successfully performed by Dr. Seebacher and the Phelps team, making him one of the most experienced surgeons for hip & knee replacement in the state (See the Center For Medical Consumers 2002 Performance Reports)

Through the wise investment of its discretionary income, Phelps kept pace with new technology acquiring and utilizing equipment that helps make surgery safer, less painful and more reliable.  New and highly trained nursing specialists were added to the team, to facilitate the whole process, beginning with the decision to undergo surgery and continuing to the completion of out-patient therapy.  Dr. Seebacher is granted complete freedom of choice for implant selection and treatment techniques to minimize risk, and to strive to assure optimal long term results. 

This year, with Dr. Seebacher expecting to perform 250 of these operations, each member of the team from anesthesiologists to orderlies, dietitians to occupational therapist, nurses to clerks know precisely what their role is in providing support for each patient undergoing a joint replacement.  Having long since mastered the understanding of what must be done to and expected from a “model patient”, the current focus is to identify the special needs of the individual patient, in advance, and prepare to address them. 

Protocols have been devised to better support and reduce the risks of surgery on patients with problems such as diabetes, lung and heart disease, obesity, history of previous blood clots, and known tendency to form scar-bone, to name a few. Special technologies or techniques are selected and combined in an effort to customize the treatment to best suit the individual patient. 

The thrust of the Phelps Joint Replacement service is not to tackle the ultra complex problems which rightfully belong in a specialty hospital in the hands of professors and researchers, but to make the more routine problems such as arthritis of the hips or knees in our patients who are sometimes old, sick or very overweight our mission, striving to make each case perfect and pleasant for the individual patient.