Orthopedics Center

Free consultation

A written surgical opinion on your knee or hip, before you book anything

The file review costs nothing and puts you under no obligation. Send standing weight-bearing X-rays of the joint, any MRI you have, your current medication list and reports from any earlier surgery or arthroscopy, and an orthopedic surgeon replies in writing with whether an operation is indicated at all, and if so which one.

A center that will sometimes tell you not to operate

Biruni Hospital runs its Orthopedics Center on an unfashionable principle: a worn joint on an X-ray is not, by itself, a reason to operate. The evidence behind that caution is worth knowing before you compare prices anywhere.

In a randomized trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015, Skou and colleagues took 100 patients with moderate to severe knee osteoarthritis, every one of them eligible for a total knee replacement, and assigned half to surgery followed by twelve weeks of supervised nonsurgical treatment and half to the nonsurgical program alone. Surgery won. At twelve months the operated group had improved by 32.5 points on the KOOS4 scale of pain and function, against 16.0 points for the exercise-based program by itself. The win had a cost: 24 serious adverse events in the surgical group against 6 in the other.

The number that matters most to someone reading this page sits lower in the paper. Of the 50 people treated without surgery, only 13 went on to have their knee replaced within the year. Roughly three quarters were still living with their own knee, and improving, twelve months later.

None of that makes joint replacement a bad operation. Hip replacement in particular is among the most dependable procedures in modern medicine; the Lancet called it the operation of the century for how reliably it returns people crippled by arthritis to ordinary life, and both cemented and uncemented implants have proved durable over decades of follow-up.

Ligaments follow the same logic as cartilage. When Frobell and colleagues randomized 121 young, active adults with a fresh anterior cruciate ligament tear, structured rehabilitation with the option of later surgery matched early reconstruction at two years, 39.4 against 39.2 on the same KOOS4 scale, and the rehab-first strategy roughly halved the amount of surgery performed: 23 of the 59 patients eventually had a delayed reconstruction, and 36 never needed one.

So the written opinion you receive from this orthopedics center will sometimes say not yet, and will name what to try first, for how long, and which result would change the answer. A center that only ever recommends surgery is not reviewing your file. It is processing it.

What the robot changes, and what it does not

Robotic-assisted knee and hip replacement at Biruni Hospital begins before the first incision, with a CT scan of your limb that becomes a three-dimensional plan of exactly where the implant should sit in your bone.

During the operation, the robotic arm holds the surgeon's cuts to that plan.

An honest summary of what that buys comes from a 2020 meta-analysis by Onggo and colleagues covering 18 studies, 2,234 robotic and 4,300 conventional knee replacements. Robotic surgery produced significantly fewer alignment outliers and lower mean blood loss, took longer in the operating room, and showed no significant difference in most clinical outcomes, in range of motion, or in complication rates. Precision of implant position is real and measurable. Proof that the knee feels better years later does not yet exist.

Pages that sell the robot as a guarantee are ahead of the evidence. The robot is a tool. Whether you need the operation at all, and the surgeon planning it, still decide the outcome, which is why this orthopedics center treats robotic assistance as one option inside a surgical plan, not as the plan itself.

Nights, weeks and flights: the trip runs on two clocks

Orthopedic travel runs on two different clocks, and confusing them is the most common planning mistake international patients make. A knee or hip replacement keeps you in hospital for 3 to 5 nights, then in or near Istanbul until the wound check and suture removal around the two week mark. Most long-haul flying waits until roughly six weeks, with the team's written clearance, because the clot risk after lower-limb surgery is at its highest exactly when a long flight would keep you seated and still for hours.

Arthroscopy is a different clock entirely. A knee or shoulder arthroscopy is often day surgery or a single night, and flying within days to a week is the normal pattern. Planned corrective bone surgery sits between the two, with two to three weeks in Istanbul and flights at four to six weeks in most plans.

Behind those dates stands the building itself: the center operates inside a university hospital of more than 600 beds with intensive care on site, which matters very little on a normal day and a great deal on a bad one. Ask that infrastructure question of every hospital that sends you a quote.

The price of a new knee or hip in Turkey

Medical tourism aggregators such as Bookimed and Flymedi list total knee replacement in Turkey at roughly $6,500 to $14,000 and hip replacement at roughly $7,500 to $12,000 for international patients, depending on the implant and the hospital. Western European and US list prices for the same operations commonly run $30,000 to $45,000. Those are indicative figures compiled from public listings, not a quote from this hospital.

The spread is not arbitrary. Six things move the number: the implant brand and its bearing type, robotic against conventional technique, whether one knee is replaced or both, how many nights you stay, how many weeks of supervised rehabilitation are included, and what the quote actually covers when something needs a second look.

A cheap headline price that excludes the implant, the rehabilitation and the follow-up imaging is not cheap. Ask every hospital for one itemized figure, in writing, and only then compare.

After you fly home

Most of your recovery happens in your own country, which is why the handover home is treated as part of the operation rather than as an afterthought.

The rehabilitation handover. The supervised rehabilitation weeks after a knee replacement decide as much of the final result as the implant does, and pretending otherwise would flatter the surgery at your expense. You leave Istanbul with a written rehabilitation protocol, set out week by week, and a named handover for the physiotherapist who will carry it out where you live; the supervised program during your stay is the work of the hospital's Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Center.

Tell the coordinator which language the protocol should be written in.

When to interrupt the routine. Routine follow-up is remote: wound photographs and X-rays taken near your home go to the surgical team over WhatsApp, and the people who did the operation answer them. Four situations should interrupt that routine.

• Sudden breathlessness or chest pain, which means local emergency services first, before any message to Istanbul.
• New calf swelling or pain, the classic clot warning.
• Fever together with a wound that is growing hot, red or starting to drain.
• A joint that was improving and abruptly stops bearing weight.

For anything on that list, local care comes first. The center then sends your operative records to the doctors treating you, so nobody has to make decisions about your leg while blind to what was done inside it.

Fractures, deformities and growing bones

Fresh fractures get fixed wherever in the world the patient happens to fall, so trauma surgery is local work by nature, and fracture repair at this center mostly serves people already in Istanbul. Spine surgery, including scoliosis and disc operations, belongs to the hospital's Spine Surgery Center.

What does cross borders: the badly healed fracture

Malunions, nonunions and limb length differences are planned operations rather than emergencies, and that is what makes them realistic to treat abroad. A tibia that healed several degrees off axis, a femur left short after a road accident, a fracture that never united: each is measured on standing films and CT before you board a plane, and the written opinion states the planned correction in degrees and millimeters. Lengthening and staged corrections need more than one visit, and an honest plan says so from the start.

Questions international patients ask before orthopedic surgery in Istanbul