Below are knee pain questions submitted to Results PT via our Ask a Therapist blog. We strive to respond to every question and concern because we recognize the importance of receiving an educated, well informed opinion regarding your condition.
If your concern is not addressed below, you can submit your question at the page linked below.
Thanks for your question. It’s hard to determine what has happened to your knee without having a detailed assessment of it. I can tell you that after you get a contusion injury (i.e. a knock or landing on a hard surface), your joint position awareness, your muscle tone acting around your knee and your movement quality all change.
Although the body is quite good at healing injured tissue, very often the other side effects that come with injury don’t automatically resolve. This can mean that there is more strain going through some very pain sensitive structures around the knee, like the kneecap or the knee joint line.
The lack of swelling is a positive sign, this could be something that isn’t terribly complicated. Because you are still getting pain and having re-injuries, you should get it addressed.
What I suggest is having one of our PT’s take a look at you. You can attend one of our clinics and get screened without a doctor’s referral. To initiate treatment, we do need to get a doctor’s signature on a plan but a screening is a great way of getting a better understanding of what you are dealing with.
I’m sorry about your accident. With the injuries and surgery you’ve had, it is normal to have a lot of muscle inhibition. Your body actively inhibits nerve messages getting through to your muscles as a protective reflex. This can be enough to explain your symptoms. The patch of numbness you have is most likely a superficial skin nerve that was cut with your surgery- it should normalize.
Some surgeons will hold on PT until you have healed enough to tolerate exercise. In general, the quicker you can initiate PT the better the outcome. I would make sure your surgeon answers your questions about the plan for PT and addresses your concerns.
That’s one of the main goals and benefits of PT – getting muscles working and moving after an injury. You would benefit. In the meantime, I would follow the advice and protocols from your surgeon, persist with doing what you can to get your quads working, and put a call in to the surgeon’s office about your concerns.
When trying to contract your quads, give some sensory input to it – a brisk self-massage, quick strokes over the skin. This can help wake the nerves up. A PT may choose to do some electrical stimulation to the quads – it’s not possible to replicate that at home without a proper muscle stim unit.
Thank you for your question. It is not uncommon to experience joint and/or muscle pain when starting a new workout plan, but it seems that you may be dealing with more than just soreness. Form is very important when weight training to avoid abnormal stresses to joint surfaces, tendons and ligaments. I would tell my patients to let pain be their guide with most exercise and to not push through pain as this is your body’s way of letting you know your limits. That being said, there are many structures that can cause pain in the knee, and without properly examining your knee to determine the involved structure, it is difficult to prescribe a game plan.
I recommend you seek out a manually trained physical therapist or other medical provider in your area that could evaluate your condition to provide the best plan of care. Don’t hesitate to drop into one of our clinics for a free consult!
The fact that your knee pain is improving is a good sign as many knee structures can be injured playing jumping sports such as basketball or volleyball.
You have several structures in the knee such as ligaments, tendons and menisci that can be strained or injured and the best way to determine the tissue of injury is to see one of our manually trained physiotherapists for a thorough evaluation. They will go through a detailed exam of your knee and develop an individualized treatment plan to get you better faster.
I am sorry that you are still having knee problems following your accident. First, I would continue to move your knee within your tolerance level in order to minimize stiffness and additional swelling. High repetition, low load activity such as a stationary bike is typically beneficial.
I do recommend an evaluation with a licensed manual physical therapist in order to determine what could potentially be causing your continued knee pain and buckling. You have several structures in the knee such as ligaments, tendons and menisci that can be strained or injured. To find out the root cause, you should see one of our manually trained physiotherapists for a thorough evaluation.
Thank you for your question, and I am sorry that you are continuing to experience pain in your knee. As you have discovered through your own independent research, there are a multitude of structures in your knee that could be the potential source of your previous & ongoing issues, with meniscus and MCL being two of them. From my experience, based on your mechanism of injury, these would be the most likely sources due to the nature of the continued complaints that you are describing.
My best advice to you is to seek an evaluation with a licensed manual physical therapist. There are several testing techniques that your PT can perform in order to gain more information about the integrity and strength of not only the meniscus and MCL, but also other ligaments and structures in your knee. If you have insurance limitations, your PT will also be able to issue you a home exercise program that will be specific to the findings during your exam. If your problems persist following PT, I would recommend further diagnostic testing.
