Patent ID: 8574254

Claim:
An arthroscopic cutting instrument comprising: elongated cylindrical members, the cylindrical members including an inner member for engaging a drive mechanism and concentrically disposed within an outer member and adapted for rotation therewithin, each of the cylindrical members having a proximate end and a distal end having at least one cutting edge; each cutting edge responsive to the rotation for causing slideable engagement with a cutting edge on the other cylindrical member; and the inner members including multiple rotationally opposed windows, each cutting window including subsets of the cutting edges, each of the subsets defined by opposed cutting edges of the cutting window, each of the multiple cutting windows responsive to oscillatory rotation for engaging a selected subset of the cutting edges corresponding to a selected cutting window with the cutting edges on the outer member, the oscillatory rotation disposing the cutting edges of the selected cutting window through a cutting range to repeatedly engage a cutting edge on the outer member without engagement by cutting edges of an unselected cutting window, an alternate cut being defined by a width of the cutting window, such that a wider cutting window corresponds to a more aggressive cut than a narrower cutting window width.