Tim Harty, The Business Times 

Dr. Joshua Thun passed the threshold to qualify Community Hospital’s Western Orthopedics & Sports Medicine for the designation of Elite Center for Lapiplasty a long time ago. Like 115 surgeries ago.

Lapiplasty, by the way, is a surgery that corrects the root cause of bunions, those often painful bumps on the side of feet near the big toe or the little toe, and Thun said studies show that one out of five adults can have some varied form of a bunion deformity.

“Sometimes they are untreated because they are asymptomatic,” he wrote in an email interview. “When they cause pain or discomfort, an individual may seek treatment from a qualified doctor.”

For the more technical explanation, Thun offered: “The root cause of bunions is not the ‘bump’ that the patient typically complains about. It is usually the joint below that, where the first metatarsal is deviating, causing an increased angle between the first and second metatarsal bones, causing the bump to appear at the big toe joint.

“Also, there are varying forms of bunions, which may mean that their treatment plan is slightly modified based off of the patient’s specific complaints or symptoms. We take the time to find the root problem of the patient’s foot pain and put a plan together accordingly.”

And for people in Grand Junction who are candidates for Treace Lapiplasty, Dr. Thun is your guy at Community Hospital, where he started working in March 2018 and performed his first Lapiplasty in November 2019. He recently performed his 415th Lapiplasty for Western Orthopedics & Sports Medicine.

Treace Lapiplasty gets its name from the company that created Lapiplasty, specifically its founder, John Treace.

The procedure can vary in time, depending on severity, but it typically doesn’t take more than an hour to 90 minutes, Thun said.

His 300th Lapiplasty procedure, along with completing an advanced skills training course, netted Western Orthopedics & Sports Medicine, 2373 G Road, Suite 100, the Elite Center for Lapiplasty designation, and Thun said that’s noteworthy.

“We are one of about 25 of these centers located in the United States,” he said. “I feel honored that the community has placed their trust in Community Hospital for treatment of their foot pain.”

Thun said he gravitated toward Lapiplasty, because “I was excited to see a surgical procedure that had more favorable outcomes for bunion correction with more reproducibility and predictability.

“Once we found that patients were having better outcomes, it didn’t take long for word of mouth to spread, increasing the amount of patients desiring treatment for their bunions.”