In recent years, thousands of Americans have been seriously injured by defective medical devices such as a DePuy hip implant. And none of these injuries should have happened.

Instead, they could have been prevented with proper safeguards from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. But instead of protecting Americans, the FDA instead has protected greedy manufacturers who value ill-gained profits at the expense of injured Americans.

A big problem is an FDA loophole known as “Section 510(k) clearance.” Because of this loophole, manufacturers can make many millions of dollars selling an bad product, while Americans can suffer greatly in the process.

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A DePuy hip implant can fail in several ways, including the fact that it has an unconventional design. That design is “metal on metal,” meaning that not only the inside of the DePuy ASR hip implant cup is metal, but also the ball on the end of the femur bone (or thigh bone).

This doesn’t have to be the case. Other implants from other orthopedic manufacturers often have a ceramic ball on the femur or thigh bone or polyethylene liners in the cups with ceramic balls on the femurs. They also may have ceramic liners on the implant’s cup. These designs prevent metal from grinding against metal in the implant.

With a DePuy hip implant, when the patient moves, metal elements grind against each other to  release tiny amounts of toxic metal into the body. And if the hip cup isn’t aligned properly, the problem can be even worse, causing a variety of DePuy side effects.

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What’s a growing segment of the population? One answer is Americans who have suffered injury due to a defective hip implant or knee implant.

Many thousands of Americans receive hip or knee replacement surgery implants each year -- and not all are old or elderly. In fact, the number of younger Americans getting such implants is growing to the point that 40 per cent of all such implants now go to people between 45 and 64 years of age.

Sadly, many receive defective hip implants or knee implants. These implants may fail within a year or two after surgery, even though they’re supposed to endure for 15 years. The result may be pain and loss of mobility for implant sufferers, to the point that they are less mobile after the implant surgery than before it.

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It’s not just older Americans who are having hip replacement surgery or knee replacement surgery today. In recent years, an increasing number of younger persons, often far from retirement age, have been getting hip implants and knee implants, too.

These persons don’t need surgery for the same reasons as older Americans, whose bones become brittle and deteriorate with age. Those in the age range of 45 to 64 often elect to have joint replacement surgery because they’re suffering from an injury or some form of pain which inhibits an otherwise active and youthful life. They opt for a joint replacement in order to regain that active life.

Indeed, the percentage of joint replacement patients aged 45 to 64 rose from 27 to 40 percent in a 10-year period ending in 2008, reports the Washington Post. At this rate, soon roughly half of all replacement surgery patients will be in that younger age bracket.

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Americans who are victims of a defective medical device in hip replacement surgery known as a DePuy hip implant are being told by DePuy that it’s issued a recall of its failed product. What does this DePuy hip recall mean to DePuy’s thousands of victims?

First, each individual who received a DePuy ASR Hip Resurfacing System or ASR XL Acetabular Hip System since 2003 (the implants did not exist prior to that) must assess their post-surgery health with help of their surgeon or physician.

Those who received the DePuy hip implants may be suffering pain and inflammation and limited movement. They may, in fact, need replacement or revision surgery to remove the failed device from the DePuy hip recall and replace it with a better one.

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