Hip Chicken Replacement Clinic

Note: The Port Manfred Dowser was good enough to let us re-use an interview we did in 2014 with Dr. J. Pilbush Finch, one of the founders of HCRC, the Hip Chicken Replacement Clinic.

What does the HCRC do?

We use advanced therapies and technologies to aid our clients who are experiencing issues with one or both hip joints.

How does the process work?

It’s pretty simple, really. We open up the patient’s hip, bust out the old joint, and stuff in a chicken.

Do you also use standard prostheses?

No, we stopped that. The construction methods and materials of standard prostheses are still undergoing change and experimentation, meaning that what a patient has installed today might be completely different next year. A chicken, on the other hand, doesn’t change much. A chicken’s a chicken, you know.

How does the cost compare with traditional methods?

You can look it up on Yahoo, but a commercial hip joint, well, a new one anyway, will cost you anywhere from $5,000 to $110,000. Chicken, on the other hand, usually goes for about three, maybe four bucks a pound. So you could do both hips here for what you’d pay for just one hip across the street — heck, you could re-hip your whole graduating class and still be saving money.

Does your technique work as well as a mechanical hip?

Oh sure, a chicken works pretty good. Of course, that’s as long as the patient follows the prescribed recovery regimen.

Recovery regimen? What is that?

Oh, no jumping around for a month or two, you know, gotta keep the stress off the chicken while everything’s still healing up down in there. And regular checkups are important too, just so something doesn’t go too far wrong before we catch it.

How long does an HCRC hip last, compared to a mechanical hip?

You know, a lot of people want to know that. The answer’s pretty complicated though, a lot of science and things, you got wear and loosening too, just like with anything else, feathers, the level of physical activity which is especially important for kids who won’t stay still, things like that. And feathers, but I said that I think.

But on average?

Well, a lot of it depends on the chicken. We’ve noticed that they don’t hold up as well as we hoped when we first opened the clinic, so they tend to start going out sooner than we expected.

And again, how long is that, on average?

Oh OK, on average, I guess you get maybe four, five days off a chicken. I mean, sometimes you get lucky and manage six, but sometimes we’ll try something new and — well, for a few days we were trying out these Mottled Houdans and that did not go well, two days tops. Sure, they look fine strutting around on a perch with that fuzzy puffball on their heads, but that’s all false advertising, you put them into hip service and they…it’s not good, not good at all. But four or five days usually, yeah.

Doesn’t that mean repeating the surgery every few days?

No, I wouldn’t call it “repeating,” it’s more like a tune-up, kind of optimizing it. You don’t think anything of replacing the oil filter on your car, and it’s just like that except it’s a chicken.

At the least, that must get very expensive

Oh, it’s not as bad as all that. I mean, we do have a subscription plan, which we recommend very strongly these days. And we’re raising our own chickens now. You know how these things are, every little bit helps.

Thank you for talking with us today, Dr. Finch.

Glad to do it, so many people misunderstand what we do here. I hope this helps them see our work in the right way. Say — it looks like you’ve got a bit of a limp there. Why don’t you hop up here and I’ll take a quick look?