Dr. H. Kurtis Biggs

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Dr. H. Kurtis Biggs Board-Certified, Fellowship-Trained Joint Replacement Surgeon.

There's a detail in Kristen's review I want to point out, because it's the part I'm proudest of: six months passed betwe...
10/04/2026

There's a detail in Kristen's review I want to point out, because it's the part I'm proudest of: six months passed between her first conversation with me and her surgery date, and nobody at my practice hurried her once.

I believe the decision is supposed to work that way. Surgery makes sense only when the knee and the patient both say so, and those two rarely arrive on the same day. In Kristen's case the knee spoke first, and she needed time to gather her questions, understand the answers, and get comfortable with the road ahead. So that's exactly what the six months were for. Some patients decide in a week, others take a year, and a few conclude after our conversations that surgery isn't the right step yet at all. Every one of those is a good outcome, because the decision belonged to the patient.

If you've been putting off a consultation because you're worried about being pressured into an operating room, Kristen's experience is the honest picture of how a first visit works. You'll leave informed, and what you do next, and when, stays entirely up to you.

Thank you, Kristen, for your trust and for taking the time to write this. It was worth the wait.

This line is attributed to Confucius, and twenty-five centuries later it remains the best rehabilitation advice I know.P...
10/03/2026

This line is attributed to Confucius, and twenty-five centuries later it remains the best rehabilitation advice I know.

Patients sometimes apologize to me for slow progress, as if the pace of their recovery were a report card. The walk to the mailbox took real effort, the pool laps came up shorter than planned, the stairs needed the railing. My answer never changes: the pace was never the point. Joints improve on consistency, not speed. Cartilage, muscle, and balance all respond to the person who shows up every day at any pace, far more than to the person who goes hard twice and stops for a month.

The same is true long before surgery enters the picture. Slower walks still feed the joint. Shorter swims still build the muscle that protects it. The only version of movement that does nothing for you is the one you stopped doing.

So whatever your pace looks like this weekend, keep it, and be a little prouder of it than you were yesterday. If the thing slowing you down is pain rather than preference, that's a different matter, and one worth bringing to my office.

Enjoy your Saturday!

Women ask me a version of this question all the time, usually while gesturing at a husband whose knees feel fine: why di...
09/30/2026

Women ask me a version of this question all the time, usually while gesturing at a husband whose knees feel fine: why did this happen to me and not him? It deserves a real answer, because the pattern they've noticed is real. Women develop knee arthritis more often than men, and often more severely, and the reasons are built into anatomy rather than anything a woman did wrong.

Start with the hips. A wider pelvis changes the angle at which the thigh bone travels down to the knee, which shifts how force moves through the joint with every step. Over a lifetime of walking, that difference in alignment concentrates load in ways men's knees largely avoid. Women's ligaments also tend to be more flexible, which sounds like an advantage but means the muscles around the knee work harder to keep the joint stable, and the cartilage absorbs more of what slips through. Add that women start with less cartilage volume on average, so the same rate of wear reaches the finish line sooner.

Hormones appear to play a role too. Cartilage has receptors for estrogen, and the years after menopause are when many women notice their knees changing fastest. Research is still working out exactly how much that contributes, but the timing so many of my patients describe is consistent with it.

Here's why I think this is worth a post. Women are often told their knee pain is just aging, just weight, or just something to live with, and many wait longer than men to have it evaluated. Understanding that the deck was partly stacked by anatomy tends to change that conversation. Pain with a structural explanation deserves a structural answer, and those answers exist at every stage.

If your knees have been asking the question, my office is a good place to get it answered properly.

Here in Southwest Florida, we build our homes around tile, and for good reason. It survives sand, humidity, and wet feet...
09/28/2026

Here in Southwest Florida, we build our homes around tile, and for good reason. It survives sand, humidity, and wet feet from the pool. What it does not do is absorb anything. Tile over a concrete slab is one of the hardest surfaces a person can walk on, and most of us walk it barefoot from morning to night without giving it a thought.

Every step you take sends force up through the leg, and something has to absorb it. Outside, your shoes take the first share. At home, barefoot on tile, your knees inherit the whole job. A single lap to the kitchen is nothing, but add up the walking an ordinary day at home involves and it becomes thousands of steps on the least forgiving surface in your life. Patients who tell me their knees feel worst in the evening, after a day spent mostly at home, are often describing exactly this.

The fix costs less than a copay. Keep a supportive, cushioned pair of shoes or sandals that live indoors and never go outside, and put them on the way you'd put on slippers. Many of my patients are surprised how much difference this one habit makes within a couple of weeks, particularly those with arthritis, where the cartilage doing the absorbing is already thinner than it once was.

Your knees handle enough during the hours you're out living. There's no reason for the hours at home to work against them too.

I recently joined Dr. Kerry Reller on the Get Healthy Tampa Bay Podcast.We covered the questions I hear most often in th...
09/23/2026

I recently joined Dr. Kerry Reller on the Get Healthy Tampa Bay Podcast.

We covered the questions I hear most often in the office: when joint pain actually warrants an orthopedic evaluation, why an abnormal X-ray doesn't automatically mean surgery, and which conservative treatments are worth trying first. From there we got into what's changed in hip and knee replacement, including same-day discharge, better implants, robotic surgery, and the recovery strategies that let most of my patients heal with little or no opioid medication.

Dr. Reller also asked about something I don't discuss publicly very often: the story behind designing my own hip implant, which now holds a United States patent. That was a fun part of the conversation to revisit.

If joint pain has been interfering with the things you enjoy, this episode is a solid place to start understanding your options, and it's the same information I'd share with you across the desk.

The link to listen is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3lSK6wJ1t4

If you give it a listen, tell me what stood out. Those comments often turn into future posts.

Edward Stanley said this in the 1870s, and a century and a half of medical research has done nothing but agree with him....
09/20/2026

Edward Stanley said this in the 1870s, and a century and a half of medical research has done nothing but agree with him.

I'll add one honest observation from my side of the exam table. Most people who stop exercising didn't actually run out of time. Somewhere along the way, moving stopped feeling good, so the walks got shorter, the gym visits got rarer, and the calendar took the blame. A knee that complains is remarkably good at convincing you that you're just too busy.

The math is worth saying plainly. A thirty-minute walk most days is a smaller time investment than managing the conditions that inactivity feeds, and the strength, balance, and joint health that movement maintains are precisely the things that keep you independent later, when independence becomes the whole game.

Today, find the thirty minutes. If the real obstacle is the knee rather than the calendar, that's a solvable problem, and solving it is a far better use of your time than working around it for another year.

Enjoy your Sunday!

Nearly everyone was warned about this by a parent or grandparent: keep cracking your knuckles and you'll give yourself a...
09/18/2026

Nearly everyone was warned about this by a parent or grandparent: keep cracking your knuckles and you'll give yourself arthritis. One doctor took the warning so personally that he spent his entire life testing it.

Dr. Donald Unger, a California physician, cracked the knuckles on his left hand at least twice a day for more than sixty years while deliberately leaving his right hand alone. His mother had told him the habit would ruin his joints, and he wanted proof one way or the other. After six decades and by his estimate tens of thousands of cracks, he examined both hands and found them identical, with no arthritis in either and no difference between the cracked hand and the spared one. He published the results and won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2009, an award for research that makes people laugh and then makes them think.

Larger studies have since confirmed what his one-man experiment suggested: habitual knuckle crackers show no higher rates of arthritis than anyone else. The sound was never bones grinding or joints being damaged. It comes from a gas bubble collapsing in the fluid that lubricates the joint, which is the same physics behind the pops and cracks your knees make when you stand up or climb stairs.

The rule I give patients is simple: sound alone is not a problem. A joint that pops painlessly is doing ordinary joint things. What deserves attention is noise that arrives with pain, swelling, grinding you can feel under your hand, or a knee that catches or locks. The soundtrack doesn't worry me. The symptoms that sometimes come with it do.

So if you've spent years feeling guilty about cracking your knuckles, consider yourself scientifically forgiven, and consider Dr. Unger's mother respectfully overruled.

September is Falls Prevention Awareness Month, and I want to give you a test you can take before you finish reading this...
09/16/2026

September is Falls Prevention Awareness Month, and I want to give you a test you can take before you finish reading this post. Stand near a counter, close enough to catch yourself, lift one foot a few inches off the floor, and count to ten. Then switch sides.

Holding a single-leg stance for ten seconds is one of the benchmarks used to assess balance in older adults, and how each side performs tells a story. If one side wobbles noticeably more than the other, especially the side with the aching knee, that's information worth having.

Here's the connection most people never hear about. Falls prevention advice usually covers loose rugs, poor lighting, and medications that cause dizziness, but an arthritic knee rarely makes the list, and it belongs there. Cartilage loss disrupts the nerve endings that tell your brain where your leg is in space, a sense called proprioception, and pain quietly changes how you walk, shortening steps and shifting weight in ways that narrow your margin for error. The research is consistent: adults with knee arthritis fall more often than their peers, independent of age.

The encouraging part is that balance responds to training at any age. A few minutes a day near the counter, single-leg stands, heel-to-toe walking, and slow sit-to-stands from a chair, rebuilds both strength and position sense. Tai chi has some of the strongest evidence of any falls prevention approach, and there are classes all over our area.

There's a full article on this in my September newsletter, including why a fall is almost never a single event but the last step in a long sequence, and how nearly every step before it can be interrupted.

So, how did the test go? Tell me in the comments, and be honest about which side wobbled.

Active patients bring me this puzzle all the time. The workout itself feels great, the knee cooperates through every rep...
09/15/2026

Active patients bring me this puzzle all the time. The workout itself feels great, the knee cooperates through every rep and every mile, and then the next morning it's stiff, achy, and a size bigger. The natural conclusion is that something happened overnight, but the real explanation is that the knee was talking about the workout all along. It just speaks on a delay.

Inflammation doesn't arrive instantly. When a joint gets loaded past what it's currently conditioned for, the biological response builds over hours, not minutes. During the workout, warmed muscles and moving fluid keep everything feeling smooth, and the endorphins of exercise quiet whatever early signals exist. Then you sleep. The joint sits still for seven hours, the inflammatory process finishes its work, fluid settles in, and you wake to a knee delivering yesterday's news.

Understanding the lag changes how you read your body. That morning stiffness isn't random and it isn't a mystery. It's feedback about yesterday's dose, which makes it one of the most useful training signals you have. A knee that's a bit stiff and loosens with your morning routine handled the load reasonably well. A knee that's visibly swollen, or that stays achy into the afternoon, got more than it was ready for, and the smart response is to adjust the next session rather than push through a repeat.

One more distinction worth knowing: muscle soreness in the thigh that fades in a day or two is normal adaptation. Swelling and stiffness in the joint itself, appearing morning after morning, is a pattern, and patterns are exactly what I'd want to look at before they turn into something bigger.

Today I find myself thinking about the people who woke up that morning expecting an ordinary Tuesday. And I think about ...
09/11/2026

Today I find myself thinking about the people who woke up that morning expecting an ordinary Tuesday. And I think about the firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and everyday people who saw what was happening and moved toward it anyway, some of them climbing stairs they knew they might not come back down.

A quarter century later, an entire generation has grown up knowing that day only through stories. That makes the remembering part our job, those of us who were there for it. Not just the loss, but the way people showed up for one another, strangers helping strangers, lines around the block to give blood, a country that for a while remembered how much more unites us than divides us.

Today we remember the nearly 3,000 lives lost, the responders who gave everything, and the families who have carried this day for twenty-five years. We will never forget.

Address

3466 Pine Ridge Road, FL 34108
Naples, FL
34109

Opening Hours

Monday 8am - 5pm
Tuesday 8am - 5pm
Wednesday 8am - 5pm
Thursday 8am - 5pm
Friday 8am - 2:30pm

Telephone

+12392612663

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