Knee Pain

 Damage or dysfunction?

As with all joints, the pain you are experiencing in your knee can come from damaged or worn joint components, (including ligaments), or from dysfunctional muscle action upon that joint. see Why do I have Pain The important thing to remember is that either damage or dysfunction can cause huge amounts of pain, but only damage may need rest, repair or surgery.

Soft tissue dysfunction quite simply needs to be fixed through treatment, and your pain will begin to immediately ease.

 Fixable?

I believe it is possible to distinguish dysfunction from damage in the knee with a 95% success rate, using relatively simple tests. If I can determine that your knee pain is due to soft tissue dysfunction, then it is almost certainly fixable, no matter how long you’ve had it or what activities seem to aggravate it.

 Knee pain

Classic examples of knee problems include pain when going up or down the stairs, or both. Pain when you run or jog, pain only when you drive, or sit with your legs crossed, maybe only pain when you perform a particular activity such as golf or dancing. You may find that a support helps with your symptoms, but this is a somewhat controversial solution.

If I can determine that your pain is due to soft tissue dysfunction, then the next step is to figure out why you’ve developed that condition. Discovering causative factors here can involve assessment of the feet, the hips, low back and pelvis.

 Treatment 

Having established these possible causative factors, my approach is usually to then deal with the immediate symptoms, ie the knee pain itself.

I want to remove your pain as quickly as possible, so I will start by improving the local factors, around the knee and thigh using specialised massage techniques, I may also start working on the causative factors, especially if I feel they may inhibit progress with the knee itself. Improvement is often immediate, or within the 2-4 days that the body takes to fully respond to treatment, or it may not begin to resolve until after the 2nd or 3rd session.

 Damage

If I can determine that your pain is due to some damage within the joint components, then we will discuss the options available to you.

I will usually still treat your knee, for two reasons:-

 1. Your body has the capacity to heal any damage, so even though there may be physical wear or tear, the body is much better equipped to deal with it if we can remove any obstruction to that healing process.

 2. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised to find that the 5% margin for error in assessing what is wrong with your knee has come into play, and contrary to appearances of damage, your knee responds well to treatment, suggesting that joint damage is either not there at all, or much more minimal than the test results suggest.

 Exercise therapy:

We are all conditioned to believe that we must ‘strengthen’ our thigh muscles in order to ‘protect’ painful knees. I believe this reasoning is flawed in a number of ways and so never recommend it. see Why Stretching and strengthening doesn't work Also see Five Knee pain Myths.

However, when there is confirmed joint damage there is an option for a long term movement protocol to regenerate the joint. see Joint regeneration protocol therapy.