St. Augustine doctor corrects foot deformity with an unconventional approach

November 25, 2019 – In an interview with The St. Augustine Record in St. Augustine, Florida, Dr. Kurtis Hort of Orthopaedic Associates of St. Augustine says “the reason the 2D osteotomy doesn’t work is because it doesn’t get to the root cause of the bunion — an unstable joint in the big toe.”¹

In 2015, before she was Dr. Hort’s patient, Jenna Jones, underwent a 2D osteotomy, where surgeons shave away the protruding bone. But a number of patients, including Jones, report their bunions returning even after the surgery and months of physical therapy.² Jones decided she need to revisit the surgery. After doing some research, Jones decided to see Dr. Hort.

St. Augustine Record reporter Christen Kelly writes, “Hort is one of the few surgeons in the area to use special titanium plates called a Lapiplasty® System to re-stabilize the joint, correcting the bunion. The instrument was created by Ponte Vedra-based Treace Medical Concepts to change how doctors approach bunion correction.”

Dr. Hort shared “The lapidus is a pretty old procedure, but the Lapiplasty® Procedure is a sort of newer [system] to do the procedure with,” Hort said. “It takes what used to be a difficult operation to do and makes the results more predictable.”

Dr. Hort explained that, unlike traditional bunion surgeries, “Lapiplasty® [3D Bunion Correction^™] is done farther back on the foot, fusing together two of the bones and straightening out the patient’s big toe, preventing it from rotating outwards and creating the painful bunion.”
“It really brings in derotation of the first metatarsal, which other traditional bunion operations have not really addressed,” Hort continues. “It’s probably the most significant part of the deformity, and for the longest time we had operations that didn’t really correct that.”