Is my hip wearing out?
Is my hip wearing out?
All artificial bearings wear, but some wear faster than others. The rate of wear depends on how hard you use the hip, and the material and design of the bearing surfaces. In general, your bearing was chosen for you, to ensure that it lasted longer than you could expect to live, no matter how much exercise you do, so it is rather unlikely that any hip inserted in the last 15 years will actually wear out through overuse, no matter how long you live. In older hips, from the 1980s and earlier, this wasn’t the case, so we can expect to have to change the bearings in some of these.