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  1. My partner created two beautiful sculpted knee joint replicas out of clay. One is considered healthy and the other one is supposed to have osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis is considered the kind of degenerative arthritis in the knee joints that can be developed from wear and tear overtime. Age is one of the major risk factors of it but it can also result from injury, infection and or from being overweight. The condition develops as the cartilage in the bone that acts as a cushion between the joints slowly wear away. As this happens, the bones begin to rub closer and closer together and causes a lot of pain for someone. Since there is less cartilage in the knee joint, movements that require load bearing or to absorb shock can cause the knee to feel very stiff, swell up and form bone spurs. On Hailee’s sculpture, she did a great job of creating bone spurs, cartilage cracks and subchondral bone exposure in the knee joint that would indicate a very serious case of osteoarthritis. I did not know about bone spurs before learning about this kind of arthritis. They are basically projections of bone that form along the edge of bone rubbing together where there is no cartilage for extra cushioning. Bone spurs sometimes go undetected for a long time and are not usually the part of osteoarthritis that cause people pain. I also did not know about how subchondral bone, or bone that sits underneath cartilage in a joint, can become exposed with the disappearance of cartilage. The impact of the knee joints meeting together with little to no cartilage is what causes people so much swelling and pain. Hailee did a great job recreating this with her sculptures and I think it is beautifully done!

    Olivia Kraska

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