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Bob's ACL WWWBoard
Re: Townsend Rebel vs Donjoy Legend -- Both are adequate off-the-shelf braces...
Posted By: Michael Frind
Date: Wednesday, 10 February 2010, at 1:36 a.m.
In Response To: Townsend vs Donjoy (EdB)
Dear Ed,
It is good to hear that your knee, with ACL reconstruction and MCL repair 21 years ago, continues to do well. You noted that you are looking for a replacement for your two-decade-old Lenox Hill brace, specifically for snowboarding.
Given that you will be purchasing an economy-type off-the-shelf brace, either the Townsend Rebel or DonJoy Legend would be fine. Both provide good protection against sideways forcing and injurious hyperextension. Both are also amenable to the use of attachments that limit flexion (in addition to limiting extension to what the knee can safely handle).
The DonJoy Legend, like all of DonJoy's rigid functional braces (including Defiance, Armor, 4Titude), has a design that incorporates a posterior tibial cuff. This makes it necessary for the user to step through the brace in order to don and doff it. This can be a bit of a nuisance in the context of snowboarding, where you will have to remove the bulky snowboard boot in order to remove or don the brace (or simply put the brace on before putting on the snowboarding boot).
Both the Rebel and Legend come with one-year warranties against failure of frame or hinges, so they are equivalent in this regard. Both are made of stamped aluminum sheet metal (which offers an adequate strength-to-weight ratio, but is not as good as a carbon-fibre-composite brace, such as the Ossur Flex or CTi-OTS), and thus can easily be bent to shape if the hinges are held in a rigid jig. Many clinicians can do this bending of the aluminum members in their offices.
Additionally, the Townsend Rebel can be ordered with pre-bent frame (Townsend offers this semi-customization service at no extra charge), which is a nice feature, particularly if your clinician/orthotist does not have a jig to hold the hinges parallel while bending the upper or lower portions of the frame in order to fit the brace to your leg. If your clinician/orthotist has taken a cast or any type of measurements of your leg and has submitted these to Townsend, then that is an extra benefit (as opposed to simply ordering the brace via the standard sized-by-circumference-measurement route).
Of course, it is also possible that the brace will fit your leg directly out of the box (if your leg shape is close to that of the average leg). However, if your leg is unusual in shape, or if you are somewhat knock-kneed or bowlegged, or if you have a lot of recurvatum (i.e. rearwards bowing of your shin), or if you have a very muscular thigh or calf, then it will be difficult to get a proper fit with an off-the-shelf brace. In such a case, a custom-fabricated brace would be very much preferable.
So, regardless of which off-the-shelf brace you obtain, be sure to try it out immediately and wear it for at least an hour. If it does not fit and if it cannot be bent to shape appropriately, then you will need to return it for a refund and look at other models of brace.
Yours truly,
Michael Frind.
Knee Library http://factotem.org/library
Messages In This Thread
- Townsend vs Donjoy (views: 181) -- EdB -- Monday, 8 February 2010, at 6:50 p.m.
- Re: Townsend Rebel vs Donjoy Legend -- Both are adequate off-the-shelf braces... (views: 262) -- Michael Frind -- Wednesday, 10 February 2010, at 1:36 a.m.
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