An alternative bent-knee prosthesis.

Prosthetic fitting in patients with below-knee amputations and concurrent knee flexion contractures poses inherent difficulties to the prosthetic rehabilitation team. The standard bent-knee prosthesis is bulky and awkward. It treats the patient functionally as a knee disarticulation and yields no potential for improving the patient's degree of contracture. This paper describes a case report with an alternative to the bent-knee prosthesis that not only offered improved function relative to the standard bent-knee prosthesis, but also acted therapeutically by reducing the patient's knee-flexion contracture.