3 Signs Your Knee Arthritis Is Bad Enough To Need A Knee Replacement
In this video, I’m going to cover with you three signs that your knee arthritis is bad enough to need a knee replacement. If you’re dealing with severe knee arthritis, you’ll want to pay close attention to each of the signs that I’m going to cover with you today, so that you can see if you got a chance at escaping having a knee replacement surgery.
My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy. This channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and pain medications. Please consider subscribing to our channel so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos that we upload every week. Let’s get into it.
Sign number one is a permanent loss of knee extension. That means you cannot fully straight out your knee, I’ve got the knee from my skeleton here. And if this is your knee, here’s the right foot right leg right knee and you look to look, you look down at your knees and you cannot fully straighten out your knee, this should be straight where your leg is up and down completely straight.
But if you feel like your knee stays bent, and you’ve done everything that you can to fully straighten out that knee and it just won’t go, then you might have a permanent loss of knee extension. Now some people can live like this, they can live with their knees slightly bent, and they can walk and move and do everything that they need to with minimal to sometimes no pain whatsoever.
But if your knee is stuck in too much of a bent position, then it can impede a lot of your functions a lot of your normal abilities to walk and get around and do normal stuff in life. If that’s you, you might be looking at getting a knee replacement.
Sign number two is a permanent loss of knee bending or knee flexion. That’s going the other direction. So we just talked about being able to fully straighten out your knee. But if you can’t bend your knee all the way gets stuck. And compared to your other knee, your other knee might bend quite a bit to where your foot comes all the way to your bottom or very close to it. But your side that is bothering you just can’t bend very well, then you might run into some problems as well.
The most common problem that people that can’t bend all the way that they run into is getting up and down from chairs getting in and out of vehicles, that is especially challenging for them with big losses of knee bending. The second most common problem that these people run into is not being able to get up and down from the ground, not and also not being able to reach their feet.
Those are the two second problems that we hear about all the time. So reaching your feet really important for foot care, you know for clipping your toenails for washing your feet, taking a shower, those kinds of things. And then being able to get up and down from the ground is vital, especially if you suffer a fall. Or you just need to get down on the ground to do normal things like take care of your home take care of work things, you need to be able to tie your shoelaces and get shoes on and off and on and socks as well.
If you’re running into these problems consistently, you can’t do these things that I just mentioned, then you might consider getting a new replacement, because you need to be able to bend your knee all the way for normal daily life. And the third sign is related to pain. Of course, the first two signs are more function whether or not you can bend or straighten your knee. But if you’re dealing with pain that’s just constant, especially if it’s bothering you at night and waking you up from sleeping. That is really bad.
Most people in this situation have tried all kinds of pain relief methods. And I want you to make sure that you try all the natural pain relief methods before you consider moving on to any replacement Because oftentimes, pain at night is a sign of an overt irritated knee joints. And if you can get that irritation down, then you might actually be able to sleep comfortably and be more comfortable during the day as well.
Five treatment options that are completely natural that you should consider trying out the first natural treatment option is go to physical therapy, find the physical therapists near you and ask them to do what’s called a joint mobilization. Most physical therapist can do this very easily, they’ll be holding your knee joint like this and pushing the joint in a specific way to stretch it.
It’s different than a muscle stretch if you were to stretch your thigh by pulling your foot or your ankle towards your bottom, that will cause a big stretch on the front of your thigh. But what you’re looking for when you go to the physical therapist is to get a knee joint stretch to make sure that the motion inside the knee joint is happening correctly and most physical therapist should be able to do this for you no problem.
The second actual treatment option that you need to try for pain relief is an exercise routine. Also the physical therapist should be able to give you an exercise routine. We’ve got tons of videos here on our channel that will help you with exercises for knee arthritis problems. In fact, we’ve linked a playlist for near arthritis help down in the description below.
So just open up that description and you’ll find it in there. You can look through the videos there’s tons of options for exercises for knee arthritis. What you will also find in that playlist are stretches that you can do if you’re stuck if you can bend or straighten not your knee. So doing a stretch routine is the third option.
If you are having limitations and straightening or bending, you got to start doing some sort of stretch routine to maximize what you’ve got. Because you might be able to get a bit more motion. If you just stretch consistently for a time.
The fourth natural thing to try is resting your knee. If it’s all flared up, it’s hurting you even at night, the cartilage inside the knee joint to the behind the kneecap, the meniscus tissue in there, it might all be very irritated. And just simply getting off your feet for a week or two, or for some people a month or two, it might tremendously help your knee pain.
If you’re the type that likes to be on your feet all the time you’re busy around the house, or maybe for work, you have to be on your feet quite a bit, if there’s a possibility, a chance of you getting off your feet, and resting relative rest, meaning you still have to take care of your daily activities, you know, your self-care stuff, you’re taking a shower, getting ready, feeding yourself doing all the normal things that you have to do to sustain yourself.
Keep it to just that, but I wouldn’t go out on a walk for exercise, I wouldn’t clean the house more than you absolutely need to be safe. And you just need to kick your feet up and rest the cartilage inside your knees. Allow your muscles to relax as well so that they’re not over pressuring your knee joint. And if you get a reduction in pain, then that’s an excellent sign that you’ve just been doing too much. And going through some rest and then beginning to fix the root problem with the correct exercises and getting your motion improving your knee joint, then you have a shot at improving your knees and avoiding having a knee replacement.
And the fifth natural treatment option is changing your diet, especially avoiding carbohydrates. A lot of foods that have high carbohydrates out there are typically inflammatory foods. Dairy products have lots of carbohydrates, typically, foods that are high in starches and sugar as well. So you’re looking at things like potatoes, any sort of bread, anything that’s sweet, you’re using real sweetener, not artificial sweeteners, the real sweeteners are going to typically increase the inflammatory properties inside your body and will cause irritation at your knee joint.
And that’s, that’s going to potentially increase your pain at night and when doing your normal daily activities. So cutting back on those types of food can make a big difference. And there’s also individual genetic responses to foods out there that some people have some people just have allergies or reactions to certain things that are not starches or carbohydrates, like I just mentioned, but they have a specific reaction to something else in their diet like tomatoes, or, or nightshade vegetables, like bell peppers and those types of vegetables.
So you’ve got to experiment and find out what your body responds well to and what it doesn’t so that you can be more pinpointed on helping your knee pain, and avoiding having knee replacements. Now if you’ve gone through all three of these signs, and you’re thinking I have all of that I can’t fully straighten out my knee, I can’t fully bend my knee. I’ve tried to do things to help it. I’ve tried to do pain relief stuff that’s natural, you know, the pain medications will do their job, but they’re not natural injections. Same thing.
They’re not natural. But I’ve tried changing my diet, I’ve tried exercises and stretches gotten a physical therapy twice, three times whatever might be, and you haven’t had relief, then I think you’ve exhausted your options and having the replacement might be right for you. Now the good news about knee replacements is these days, they are done very well.
Of course you’re putting yourself at risk for infection and other problems that can arise from having a knee replacement. But if you’re dealing with these problems that I’ve mentioned in this video, the risk might be worth it for you. If you feel like you still have a shot you haven’t fully exhausted every option you haven’t gone to see a specialist physical therapist that is that deals with these types of problems specifically, in helping people that are looking to avoid surgery, then you need to go through those options.
You need to go exhaust every option that you can, so that you can have confidence going into the surgery and knowing that you did everything in your power to avoid having this procedure and getting back to normal. Please do your due diligence. If you’re going to have a surgery, go talk to two or three doctors. This is a permanent thing that’s going to be done to you. You need to have confidence that if you have the surgery, it’s done by a surgeon that’s going to do a fantastic job with you.
It has excellent surgical rates, excellent outcomes, and plan out the whole process, look at the therapy that you’re going to have to do afterwards. Make adjustments in your life as far as your family, your routine, your work schedule. If you’re still working as well, you need to plan this out very well so that you can have the best outcome possible for your knee.
If you only had one or two of the signs that I talked about in the video, you are only limited in one direction and your knee and the pain at night might be something that’s bothering you, then you probably have a good chance at avoiding surgery and you should consider going back to all those natural treatment options that I mentioned. Go back to our playlist of knee arthritis videos that are in the description below and exhaust all those options.
Before you move forward into talking to a surgeon, you might surprise yourself you might actually improve quite a bit and be able to get back to things like dancing going up and down stairs, and possibly even exercising. Now I want to mention to you that if you don’t have access to a physical therapist for whatever reason, we do offer a program called the 28-Day Knee Health And Wellness Boost Program.
You can find more details about it in the description below. It’s a 100% online and on demand program that I’ve developed to help people increase strength in the right areas to take pressure off their knee joints and help heal a knee joint for the long term. Now this program costs less than what you would pay to go to physical therapy for one day, and it’s 28 days worth of help.
If you do the program consistently. You’ll be doing exercises stretches as well as getting helpful advice from myself. I’ll coach you along the process so that you can implement what I teach you in the program into your daily routines and adapt it to whatever you’re doing so that you can have confidence in moving forward in your life with having better knee health. Go check that out.
It’s in the description below. And give us a thumbs up if you thought this video was helpful. Don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss out on any of our future videos. And if you’ve got a question about something, please drop it in the comments below and we’ll get to it as fast as possible. Have a wonderful day. Bye
