11 Questions To Ask Your Doctor When They Suggest Knee Surgery

Here are 11 questions to ask your doctor when they suggest having knee surgery. Most surgeons will focus on answering questions related to the recovery of the knee surgery or regarding the actual procedure that they’re going to do for the knee surgery.

But I think it’s important for you to take a step back and ask questions about whether or not you even need the surgery to begin with. And I’m talking about surgeries like a knee replacement surgery, an ACL reconstruction, a meniscus surgery and other cartilage or knee joint related surgeries.

Now these questions might take some courage for you to ask, especially the last few questions. But I think it’s really important because you’re going to be your own best advocate and this is your body, not theirs.

So you need to ask these questions. And also please remember to ask these questions from a nonconfrontational body language and intent, you need to ask it as if you’re concerned about yourself your own well being your own knee, and not coming at it as if you’re attacking the surgeon, because oftentimes, they’ll take it that way, if you come at it the wrong way.

And if they’re defensive about their answers, whenever you’re asking them these questions, especially if you’re coming at it from a non confrontational viewpoint, well, that kind of exposes some problems about that surgeons, potentially their bedside manner or their security, their certainty about their surgical procedures.

I’ll share more about that as we go along. So let’s ask the first question, is there a possibility that I might improve if I wait? The reason why you might ask this question is because what I see as a specialist who helps people not have surgery is oftentimes they are just irritated. They’re just swollen.

And right now it’s an angry knee joint. And if they just wait a little bit and do some of the right things to get it to calm down, that knee feels tremendously better. And then the individual may no longer be considering surgery, they may be thinking, Oh, well, if it’s at this point, right now, I don’t think I need surgery I can get by without it.

And number two is a follow up to that one is, what is the downside, if I wait three months to see if this knee feels better? And maybe even normal again? When you ask the surgeon this question, they’re probably going to tell you, well, let’s try some non surgical options. Or they may say, go ahead and give it a try, they’re probably not going to push you into having the surgery right now.

But if they are, then that might express some sort of urgency behind them, you have to ask the question, you know, what’s the deal? Why are you so urgent about it? And you might even ask that as a secondary or follow up question to this, because maybe there’s some pieces of information that they’re not giving you something they see on the MRI or the X ray. And if there’s nothing like that, then you have to kind of ask yourself the question, why are they being so pushy?

Question number three is what non surgical options have we not yet tried. Usually, when you talk to a surgeon, they’re going to offer you options like pain injections, like a cortisone injection, of course, over the counter or prescription strength, pain medications, they may also send you to physical therapy, or maybe even some of the regenerative medicine stuff like stem cells, or PRP injections, they may offer all these other options as a non surgical option before actually having a surgery.

But I would ask them, because sometimes they haven’t suggested something to you that might work. But it just hasn’t worked for many of their patients, and they’re withholding it. But if you ask that question, they may offer it and delay you on the surgery, you might find something that works for you, so that you can avoid surgery. Number four is do you know a specialist that’s an expert in preventing surgery.

Now I’m talking about an expert like myself, I’m a manual physical therapist, and I help people avoid surgery, avoid injections and medications, while getting back to being healthy, active and mobile. And what I can tell you from my experience, and working with surgeons is they don’t really know what we do, they don’t really know exactly how we operate.

And when I talk to a surgeon before they’ve worked with me, because we get surgeons that come into our office at times, they don’t think that I can really handle the situation because they’re often seeing myself as a physical therapist, which tends to help people after surgery. And that’s not my specialty, I can do that work.

But I can actually help people prevent surgery. And just as a side note, I’ve got online programs to help people suffering from knee arthritis problems from a failed knee replacement from a meniscus problem and other knee problems.

There’s links to all these programs down in the description below. And I’m also going to link down in the description below playlists for all of these conditions knee arthritis, meniscus problems and other knee problems.

These are videos on our YouTube channel that you can go watch right now to begin getting non surgical help at fixing your knee problem. Oftentimes surgeons don’t know about these kinds of specialists and you have to ask them that they say, well, you’ve already tried physical therapy or I’ve sent people to these physical therapy clinics and it didn’t work out. You might have to go and do your own research.

Question number five is if I can bend and straighten my knee all the way, what would I be benefiting from having surgery? The reason I ask this question is because oftentimes especially with knee arthritis, people are looking to gain more motion, they can’t fully bend or straighten out their knee and getting the knee replacement could improve that situation.

But I’ve also seen many patients that actually have full range of motion, or they’re missing just a tiny bit. And it’s likely because it’s swollen, and it just doesn’t want to bend all the way. If that swelling were to go down, it could all be there, and it’s not even stopping them from doing anything, then they can wait and potentially not have the surgery at all, they can just let it calm down and skip out on the surgery.

So I would ask the surgeon and see what they say if they stumble on their words, and they’re not really certain about it. Or if they flat out tell you I don’t know, then that gives you some hints about whether or not you need to have surgery.

Question number six is what abilities would I be giving up if I go through with the surgery. This is something that surgeons don’t typically talk about, because it’s kind of looking at the bad side of surgery, if you will. And I’m talking about things like being able to run being able to do certain activities like kneeling, gardening, being able to exercise the way that you like to you need to share with them.

What you’d like to do for exercise, maybe things like hiking all of those activities, you may or may not be able to do all those activities, depending on the type of surgery that you have, and what your surgeon says. You need to take that into consideration.

Now question number seven, you need to practice and rehearse a bit to get it right and you need to be prepared for your surgeon to maybe be a little perturbed. Here’s how it is. I’ve heard that there’s medical research, comparing a placebo knee surgery with a normal knee surgery, and that patients are getting the same improvement afterwards is a real thing.

Then ask this question. Do you know of any research like that about your surgery that you want to do on me? That’s a difficult question for the surgeon to answer because he may not be keeping up with the research. And there actually is research like this, especially regarding knee meniscus tears.

They’ve done research studies where they’ve operated on somebody’s knee meniscus. And then they’ve done a comparison placebo surgery where they went in, they made holes, they made incisions, person was under anesthesia, all that stuff. But they didn’t touch the meniscus, it didn’t actually do anything to the meniscus. And afterwards, in the follow ups, everybody got better about the same amount.

So they’re asking, why do we even need to do a meniscus surgery, maybe it’s not even necessary. Because if people improve the same amount afterwards, it’s maybe a waste of time and money.

Now keep in mind come at the surgeon from an honest place. From me just wanting your help, you want to make the best decisions for your health and not from an angle of I’m trying to pin you down on trying to, you know, make me do a surgery that I don’t want to because that’s usually not the intent of surgeons, they genuinely want to help you.

They just may not know the full picture, and getting questions like this will challenge them to be a better surgeon in the long run. Here’s another difficult question for you to ask your surgeon they’re all difficult from here on. So that I can make the best decision about my health, would you mind sharing the success and failure rates of the surgery for you and for the clinic.

That one will put them back on their heels. But you have to ask the beginning parts so that I can make the best decision about my health, because then your intent is there, you just really want to make the best decision about your health, not necessarily try to, you know, start an argument or a fight with the surgeon, you don’t want to do that that’s not a good place to go. If they do get defensive anyway, then that exposes something about the surgeon.

But hopefully they’re happy to receive this question because they’re great surgeons, and they want to share the successes with you and show you that there aren’t very many failures in their clinic, that would be the best situation for you. Because then you can move forward in confidence should you require surgery?

Number nine would be a follow up to this question. It’s I’d like to know the percentage of patients that require another surgery after having this first one. And this is something that surgeons don’t typically talk about, especially with surgeries like a meniscus repair, they end up having a meniscus repair and then needed another one maybe on the other knee or on the same knee.

And then eventually, they might see that same patient for knee arthritis problems later on. And they ended up having a knee replacement. And there’s actual research connecting people that have had a meniscectomy where they take out a chunk of the meniscus, those people developing knee arthritis much faster than people that did not have a knee meniscus surgery in their knee.

So they need to know about this stuff, and you’re not the person to bring it up to them, you’re just not going to come from a good angle. And if you’re not a surgeon, but if you ask these types of questions, it’s going to have to force that surgeon to go research this a bit more because they’re going to be thinking, our patients are getting real smart and they’re finding some good information out there. Maybe I need to make sure I’m offering the best services possible.

Number 10 is what is the worst thing that could go wrong if I go through with the surgery. They don’t talk about this very often. They’re usually saying, well, I’ll do this operation, you’ll be in and out the same day, you’re going to have incisions like this big, they minimize everything. And then you’ll be out and walking the first day afterwards within 24 hours.

And within two months, you’re going to be back to walking as much as you want and going back to work and doing everything that you want to do. And in reality, you need to like double or triple that timeframe because that’s what most of you will end up going through as it takes six months a year even to get back to feeling normal again.

And there’s hiccups that go up that come up along the way. And so it’d be good to ask ahead of time, what kinds of worst case scenarios am I looking forward to it forward to facing if I do end up having the surgery? And you might need to ask a question differently. Like, what’s the worst case you had after having the surgery? Like, what’s the worst thing that happened?

What’s the longest amount of time that somebody has dealt with problems? After the surgery, the recovery process needed? Make sure you ask this question properly, so that you’re getting the best information for yourself. And the final question, this one is kind of a gut punch to the surgeon, but it’s a good one and a good surgeon will handle this in stride, it’s are you the best person to see for this problem?

Said differently, is there another person that’s better at handling this type of surgery than you. The right surgeon will take this head on and say, absolutely I’m the best, you’re seeing the best surgeon in the city, in the region in the country, whatever, whatever place you’re in? Or they might say, you know what?

That’s a good question. Let me refer you to my colleague who’s actually better at this than me. Great question to ask. And it’ll really expose the character of the surgeon, and it’ll show you if they really care about you or not, or if they’re just trying to maybe get a surgery in which I hope not and really isn’t the case in most conditions.

Hope this video was helpful for you. I want to remind you that we’ve got links down the description to free videos on YouTube to help knee arthritis, meniscus problems, ACL issues, chrondromalacia patella, all kinds of other knee conditions, as well as programs that you need to learn about if you’ve got those conditions.

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