Guichetnail and Betznail are obsolete mechanical nails with few differences between them.
Mechanical nails make rehabilitation much longer and lengthening too painful. Also there were many cases of the nails lengthen with very small movements without the will of patient so they are dangerous too.
Precise 2 is.partially weight bearing so I don't believe.you will be more than 3.months in the wheelchair.
The best though is for someone who wants internals to wait until there is a clear decision about stryde. In a few months we will know if it is safe and back to market or no.
Till then noone should make its final decision.
That's fair to say "wait to hear what happens with Stryde." But I am just very doubtful there will be a quick resolution to the problem. If they do a redesign or alter it in any way (which is inevitable - they must fix something in the design), they will then have to do trials on that to get it approved first as well before general use too, right? That could cost another 6-12 months just to get re-approval on their modifications. That's my guess anyway.
In the mean time, either way, on what basis are you so against the mechanical nails? Just because something uses simpler technology doesn't mean it's bad technology. You can see in his journal how incredible for example tallertree did with the Betzbone. He posts lots of videos of him walking around through his recovery which was smooth and uneventful:
http://www.limblengtheningforum.com/index.php?topic=6689.0Obviously there will always be good and bad cases but I don't think it can be said a mechanical nail is certainly so poor or "obsolete" an option if it has the potential to give such a fantastic outcome and experience.
As far as I can tell the only major disadvantage of the mechanical nails is you can't ratchet them back down to close a gap in case of nonunion. But I presume that could be managed by just going slower and not progressing unless you see a good callus forming in the gap. If no callus, don't progress and instead work on
PEMF/LIPUS bone stimulation until it forms.
I haven't heard of unintentional ratcheting - that would be no fun. But even the magnetic devices have a failure in their distraction method. In
this study 2% of the PRECICE units failed for distraction. More importantly between 11% and 41% of the PRECICE nails bent/broke or had some other structural instability. Probably from people accidentally putting pressure on them or weight bearing too soon. That's a pretty big percentage.
I'm open to any perspectives and curious for your further thoughts. I am just reaching a point where I am ready to finally do this and I thought Stryde would be perfect - don't have to go to Europe, weight bearing in New York or Florida - and then this happened. Personally I'm not in the mood to wait another 2-3 years. I'm too old already.
If Stryde turns out to be dead for 1-2 years, I think on my current perspective I would likely go with a mechanical nail. Or if not that, just give up and never do it at all.