Recovery gear that actually helps after hip and knee surgery

You need far less equipment than the internet suggests. A handful of inexpensive items covers most recoveries, and the right time to get them is before surgery — with same-day joint replacement now the norm, your home needs to be ready the day you leave the operating room. Set up your recovery station, clear walking paths, and test everything while you are still moving well. One island-specific tip: shipping to Hawai‘i often takes longer than mainland delivery estimates suggest, so order at least two weeks before your surgery date.

Two spending rules. First, ask before you buy a walker or crutches: hospitals and insurance often arrange these, and duplicates waste money. Second, skip the exotic gadgets. Continuous passive motion machines are no longer routinely recommended after knee replacement, and expensive recovery devices rarely beat the basics: ice, elevation, walking, and the home program covered in my guide to a speedy recovery after joint replacement. Your discharge instructions always come first.

Everything below is something patients here actually use. As an Amazon Associate, and through the other programs linked on this page, the practice may earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you — that supports keeping resources like this one available. Nothing is recommended for that reason, and none of it replaces the plan you leave the office with.

Jump to: Durable medical equipment · Therapy equipment · Clothing & compression · Surgical dressings · Over-the-counter medications · Surgical nutrition · Fullscript supplements

The bathroom is the highest-risk room in the house during early recovery — hard surfaces, water, tight turns, and a leg that is still waking up. Night trips are the classic setup: you're groggy, the floor is dark, and the medications that manage your pain can also dull your balance. A few inexpensive items take most of that risk off the table, and they matter for every joint replacement patient in the first weeks.

Think of these as fall insurance rather than convenience items. A fall onto a fresh hip or knee replacement can turn a smooth recovery into a fracture or a return trip to the operating room — the cheapest equipment on this page protects against the most expensive complication. Set it all up and rehearse the routine before surgery day.

Bending to your feet is the hard part early on. A reacher-grabber, a sock aid, a long-handled shoehorn, and a long-handled sponge cover almost everything below your knees, and slip-on shoes or elastic laces remove the fiddliest task of the day. Knee replacement patients tend to use these for a few weeks while deep bending is uncomfortable; most find they retire the gadgets quickly as motion returns.

Hip patients, a nuance worth knowing: with the direct anterior approach Dr. Morton uses, most patients have no formal hip precautions and often need fewer of these aids than older advice suggests. Patients recovering from posterior-approach surgery or revision procedures may be given bending restrictions where these tools become essential. Buy the inexpensive kit if you want the convenience — just do not be surprised if half of it ends up in a drawer by week three.

If you buy one thing, make it good cold therapy. Icing 15–20 minutes at a time, several times a day with a cloth barrier between ice and skin, measurably reduces swelling and pain — which means less medication and easier therapy sessions. It is the closest thing to a free lunch in knee replacement recovery, and it matters for hips too.

You have two good options. A motorized ice machine (a cold therapy unit) circulates chilled water through a wrap around the joint — convenient, consistent, and easy to use overnight per your surgeon's guidance. Large gel packs do the same job for far less money; buy at least two so one is always in the freezer, and look for packs sized to wrap a knee or lie flat over a hip. Either works. What matters is that you actually use it, on a schedule, like a medication.

Swelling drains downhill, so elevation is part of the job description. A firm wedge pillow lets you elevate the whole leg — for knees, the rule is toes above the nose, knee straight. Avoid parking a small pillow just under the knee for hours; keeping the knee bent all night encourages stiffness exactly where you are fighting for extension. Compression socks, if your surgeon prescribes them, help control ankle and calf swelling — wear them as directed rather than by guesswork.

For the walker itself, small accessories earn their keep: a clip-on pouch or tray so you can carry a phone and a water bottle with both hands on the frame, and glide attachments so the walker slides smoothly on the floor rather than catching. Add a sturdy chair with armrests at your recovery station, and you have covered the equipment that does real work in the rapid recovery playbook.

Your incision leaves the operating room closed under a sterile dressing that stays on and stays dry for at least a week. What follows is for the weeks after that, once the office has told you the wound is ready for it.

Some of the most useful recovery items are the ones you should not buy on your own initiative. Lidocaine patches can quiet aching muscles around — never on — a healing incision, but placement and timing matter. Stool softeners are genuinely important, since anesthesia, opioids, and inactivity reliably slow the gut; most patients should start one early, but the choice should match your medication plan. Over-the-counter pain relievers are the foundation of modern pain control, yet acetaminophen has daily limits and anti-inflammatories interact with blood thinners and kidney conditions.

The rule is simple: anything that goes in your body or on your skin gets checked against your discharge plan first. The full home medication playbook — schedules, tapering, and safe disposal — is in medication after surgery. And if surgery is still ahead of you, an orthopedic consultation is where your personal equipment and medication list gets sorted out, item by item.

Surgery is a metabolic event, and going into it well fed changes how you come out of it. Two programs cover the weeks on either side; you need one of them, not both. The evidence behind them is on the surgical nutrition page.

Amazon covers the hardware of recovery; for supplements, quality control matters more. Dr. Morton dispenses professional-grade supplements through Fullscript, an online dispensary that ships pharmaceutical-grade products from verified manufacturers — so what is on the label is actually in the bottle. Recommendations are individualized at your visit rather than one-size-fits-all, and pair with the whole-food approach on the surgical nutrition page.

Ask at your appointment or call (808) 439-6201 for an invitation to Dr. Morton’s Fullscript dispensary.