If you’re reading this, your knees are probably as fucked as this author’s are. For Christ’s sake, you clicked on a link about medical trials via a Facebook page devoted to snowboarding.

There’s hope for us then, as a research centre in Melbourne is undergoing what it claims is a world first in medical trials: using stem cells harvested from the patient’s own body to heal the notoriously un-mendable cartilage in human knee joints.

Whilst the report above is certainly anecdotal in content, for anyone who hears that horrible crunching noise whenever they stand up it’s a godsend. Priced at $8,000 AUS – just over £4,000 – it sounds like a bargain for another twenty years of snowboarding…