DO NOT GO FOR TIBIA SURGERY. I will repeat myself! Complication rate for Tibia is higher no matter what other people are trying to tell you. Because of the alignment that easily can be screwed up between tibia and fibular espically if it is without a nail inside the bone. This can give you issues with walking without pain for the rest of your life, happens to many Tibia patients. Do you really wanna wear giant fixators for like 10 Months / 5 cm? Femurs heal faster, barely any chance of malalignment, and almost zero chance of you delevoping deep infections that can be deadly.
Summarize internal Femur: Safer, less complications, easier to hide, quickest. Almost any western doctor recommends internal femur over any external method including Rozbruch, Paley etc... And these are some of the best surgeons in the world!
AND THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF ALL! You doing this surgery to gain as much height as possible and with the femurs you can get up to 8 cm safely, where for the tibias only 5 cm safely. Most who go over gets into serious complications unless there starting height is like 173+ cm.
On his interview with Cyborg4Life, Paley said that externals are a viable option if you're doing it with a skilled surgeon that has experience with the technique. He did externals all through the 80s and 90s and he invented(or he claims to have invented) LON. He did LON on both femurs and tibias.
I timestamped it(2:37:00):
There are articles on pubmed showing that, LON has been superior in many instances to early (mechanical) internal nails but it's inferior to the modern magnetic nails due to, among other things, being less precise.
LON on femurs, in particular, is painful because the pins will cut the quad muscles a bit. However, after a year of recovery, the lasting damage is not significantly different from internal methods.
Externals also risk infection but most infections can be safely treated with antibiotics.
Here is Paley's original LON article:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9378732/Twenty-nine patients (thirty-two femora) had femoral lengthening over an intramedullary nail(...)There were six refractures of the distraction bone in the matched-case group. In the group that had had lengthening over an intramedullary nail, one nail and one proximal locking screw failed. The over-all rate of complications was 1.4 per cent in the group that had had lengthening over an intramedullary nail compared with 1.9 per cent in the matched-case group.
No deadly bone infections, no completely destroyed quad muscles etc.
Why western doctors do not do it? Because they don't need to. These doctors are multimillionaires and have an endless stream of patients willing to pay for internals. Internals give the patients higher satisfaction and they will rate the doctor highly. They don't need to bother doing externals anymore but they do it for deformities as the TSF is useful for that.
One of the reasons you guys see more LON complications is that a lot of doctors doing LON femurs are crap. Just because some butcher in India is crippling people with LON femurs does not mean the thousand of patients treated with LON by Paley in the 90s are now crippled.
LON is old school, it's more painful and sleeping with frames is a pain. It isn't the worst method, it won't necessarily lead to deformities, bone infections, torn muscles etc.