 Hello, I'm Dr. Sunil Kinney, consultant joint replacement and arthroscopy surgeon at Manipal Hospital's Bangalore. There are some medications which have to be restarted or continued after surgery. First of all is the routine medications that the patient is on. Say, if the patient is diabetic, then anti-diabetics. If the patient is hypertensive, then anti-hypertensives. And all the medications like heart medications which the patient was previously taking has to be restarted. It's also important to note that we prescribe blood thinners after a knee or a hip replacement. So these blood thinners have to be taken for a variable duration. It's very important to take these blood thinners to prevent clots in the legs which we call as deep vein thrombosis. These clots can be dangerous and can go to the lungs and cause what is called as pulmonary embolism. So it's important that you take these anticoagulants which your surgeon prescribes for a variable amount of time. Say for a knee replacement, it could be about two weeks for a single knee replacement. For the bilateral or both knee replacements, it could be about three weeks. For a hip replacement, it could be around four weeks. Other drugs that the patient has to be started or continued is the calcium supplement. So it's important for the patient to have a good bone stock, good adequate strength in the bones. So we prescribe the patient on regular calcium with the vitamin D3 combination which the patient has to continue indefinitely. It's also important or the patient can continue multivitamins as well. It's also important to note that if the patient has any osteoporosis or not, we scan the patient if deemed necessary with what we call as a bone mineral density or a BMD scan. So this would indicate whether the patient actually is osteoporotic which indicates that there's very less calcium in the bone. If so, then the patient has to be started on special medications for say about one or two years and then recheck the BMDs. So this would be in addition to the routine calcium the patient is already taking.