7 Tips To Make Sure You Don’t Hurt Your Meniscus Again After Surgery

If you’ve had a meniscus surgery, you don’t want to re injure it and have to go through this whole process all over again. In this video, I’m going to share with you seven tips to make sure you don’t hurt your meniscus again after surgery.

Tip number one is follow your surgeons restrictions right after you have a meniscus surgery your surgeon should have given you either before surgery and other pre op stuff, or immediately after surgery. Some restrictions, meaning there’s certain things that you just can’t do.

Usually they’ll give you paperwork as well. And there’ll be things like you can’t bend your knee more than 90 degrees, you have to be in this brace all the time. And there’s timeframes on it. Usually it’s like for four weeks or six weeks, maybe two months, you need to make sure you understand those restrictions.

Because if you don’t follow those restrictions, then there’s a possibility that you’re going to re aggravate your meniscus and not get the best outcome after your meniscus surgery. It’s especially important if you’ve had a meniscus repair or a transplant. But if you’ve had a mastectomy, those tend to have the least amount of restrictions. And those are the most common surgeries, the meniscus dummies.

If you didn’t get the restrictions from your surgeon, then what you need to do right now is pause this video, come back to it once you’re done, and Go call your surgeon’s office and just tell them hey, I’m a patient of Dr. so and so I don’t know what my restrictions are. I’ve had a meniscus repair surgery or mastectomy or whatever you had done, and what restrictions do I have I need to know so that I don’t mess things up. And I’m sure they’ll find them for you.

They probably have them on your file, and they can email them to you and go pick them up. Number two is using crutches or a cane to offload your knee. If you had a meniscus operation, then it’s not ready to take the full force of your normal body weight in all the activities that you’re doing.

So it makes sense to offload your meniscus by using a crutch or cane, you want to use this on the opposite side from the side you had the operation on. So if I’m going to put this on my right side, then I should have had the operation on my left. If you had a right meniscus repaired, then this, this is supposed to go on your left side.

And when you take a step, you want to lean on the crutch or the cane if that’s what’s in your hand and put more body weight through the crutch or cane than you would through the meniscus. Ideally, you might take off 20%, maybe 50%, maybe even 90%. And you’re barely putting any pressure through the through the leg at all.

But you’re getting the muscles to work. And you are putting some pressure to the meniscus which does stimulate healing, but you’re doing it in a way that does not aggravate your meniscus. Because what you want to avoid is increasing the swelling response. Again, getting it painful and hot.

Again, you don’t want to do anything that aggravates a meniscus, but you do need to become more active and start to move. Once your surgeon says it’s okay for you after you follow the restrictions. And of course, if you’re under the guidance of another healthcare professional, like a physical therapist, follow their instructions as well to make sure that you’re not aggravating your knee again, using a crutch or cane is so under done.

And honestly I see a lot of mastectomy patients that don’t use a crutch hurricane their surgeons never said anything about it. Nobody ever said anything. In fact, I’ve had patients come back and tell me that they’ve gone for the follow up with their surgeon holding a cane or a crutch in their hand.

And the surgeon has scoffed at them saying what are you using that for you should be walking without anything. But I always educate my patients and I tell them, listen to your knee, make sure that it’s not swelling more than it’s not becoming aggravated.

And chances are if you’re using that crutch or the cane, you’re probably on your feet more than if you don’t because as soon as you start walking without it, that knee doesn’t like it, it starts to swell and become painful and irritated. And you just feel better using the cane and the crutch. So why not?

Now my hunch on why surgeons will say this is because they’re not experts in rehabilitation. They’re experts in surgery. And so once they’ve done the surgery, I don’t always agree that they’re the best person to follow and advice for how to get back to normal 100%. You got to understand what happened in the surgery and how that’s going to affect you long term.

But as far as getting the strength back healing, the meniscus, healing the tissues, getting your mobility back, all of those factors need to be done with a rehabilitation specialist so that you get the best outcome possible.

Tip number three, I started to mention it listen to your knee. What I mean by this is if you’re doing some activity that flares up your knee, it could be an exercise that a healthcare professionals doing. I’ve had patients do this before. I give them an exercise thinking this is going to be good for them because it makes sense.

But it doesn’t give them the response that I’m looking for they end up getting swollen, it could be that they’re the patient did it wrong, it could be that it wasn’t the right time for this exercise.

There are many factors many variables, which you need to understand is that even a good exercise that’s deemed appropriate for you by a healthcare professional, even an expert specialist healthcare professional, it might still hurt you and you need to be guided by your knee by how you feel.

If your knee doesn’t like it, it’s not good for you right now, doesn’t mean that you can’t ever do that. It just means that right now today, it’s not going to work for you, it’s going to swell you up, it’s going to make you feel worse, it’s going to make you move backwards in your rehabilitation, you need to be doing things that feel good on your knees, so that you can move forward, and then bring in those good exercises, good stretches, good movements, when the time is right, and your knee accepts it better.

Now, there is an exception to this rule, if you had a meniscus surgery, and you’re behind in your rehabilitation for some reason, and you’ve lost motioning your knee, because maybe that’s how you ended up or after the surgery or you had a loss of motion, going into your surgery, and you kind of have to gun it to get more mobility to meet the timeframes for healing, then you might need to stretch or do certain exercises that kind of push you into a grimace, or maybe even make you shed a tear several tears.

But you should only do that with the guidance of a healthcare professional, who’s making sure that they know what they’re doing. And they’re guiding you through this whole process. I with all our online guidance here like on this YouTube video that you have. The golden rule with everybody is don’t do anything that hurts, you only do things that are feeling well for you.

And if you feel that you’re going into a situation where it might hurt, go get expert help go get in person help from a specialist so that you make sure you’re doing the right thing for your specific situation.

Number four, kind of on the same thread, but I need to talk about this. Don’t overstretch for people that have had a meniscus surgery, and they’ve lost some motion like they can’t bend or straighten out their knee all the way you may be guided to stretch aggressively into a bend or into straightening your knees so that you can get that motion and it kind of makes sense.

But it can compress the meniscus quite a bit in this knee model here. This bluish structure is the meniscus. And when you bend it and the tissues around there are tight, maybe there’s scar tissue from the surgery, your muscles in the area might be very short and stiff and tight. And when you force your knee into a stretch, it starts to compress the joint together, which compresses the meniscus and can aggravate it.

So a better option is going to be to do small, less intense stretches that feel gradual that don’t feel very intense. And do them more frequently. And make sure that you’re still listening to your knee, and then you’re not becoming irritated. So I’ll often tell patients that have a limitation in motion to do a mild stretch on a scale of zero to 10. Keep it like a two, a one or a two, if you’re hitting three, you probably shouldn’t hang out past a three or four.

Once you’re more intense into the 567 and beyond, you’re likely over compressing your knee, you’re going to start grimacing at that point, and you’re going to aggravate your meniscus. But if you keep it light and hold it for 2030 seconds, maybe a minute at most, and do this more frequently throughout the day.

And if it starts to hurt you, you know after the 10th time you’ve done it, you can stop and back off, but chances are you’ve gained some good motion. But come back to it the next day. Give yourself a break. If you need it, that’s fine. But what you want to avoid is over stretching, aggressively stretching hitting that 5678 a 10 at a 10 intensity on a stretch. You don’t want to be doing that it’s going to aggravate you anymore.

Tip number five is get stronger glutes right after a meniscus surgery, there’s potential for your quads, the muscles that are on the front of your thigh to not work very well. This sometimes happens. And so the emphasis becomes on rehabilitation right after a meniscus surgery, the emphasis goes to get those quads to activate more and very often you lose muscle in the quads, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

What’s really important right after the surgery is to get the activation of the quads back so that you can consciously tighten up your thigh muscle because once you can tighten up your thigh muscle, then you’re going to be able to use it. You don’t even necessarily get all the bulk back all the muscle that you may have lost.

The emphasis now needs to go to the glutes because the glutes are important for decompressing the knee. See when you get stronger quads, the quad muscles come on to the front right here and they attach to the kneecap. And the stronger those quads are the there’s a tendon as shown here on this model that goes past the kneecap and to the shin bone right here.

So when it tightens up, it’s going to compress it’s going to shove up the shin bone into the thigh bone and squash the meniscus more. But if you get the glutes way up in the hip to work better, then you can actually normalize the pressure take pressure off that meniscus and that’s the emphasis of where your rehabilitation should go.

I go into great detail on this and other YouTube videos. You can go find the playlist in the description below that says knee meniscus surgery help and you will find more videos on how to strengthen your glutes.

I’ve also got a playlist in there in case you haven’t had a meniscus surgery that says knee meniscus help. Go click that link and you’ll see a bunch of other videos with even more exercises and Help for a meniscus problem.

Number six is be patient, it happens very frequently that I’ll get a mastectomy patient and they’re told by the surgeon, you’re going to be doing everything just fine be back to normal in two to three months. The first thing I tell them when they walk in the office tell me they’ve had this surgery is I say, double or triple whatever the surgeon told you. And the reason for that is they’re now rehabilitation experts.

I’ve already established this, there’s surgeons, and I’m sure they did a fantastic job with whatever surgery they did on your meniscus. But now we’ve got to do the recovery, which can take a long time. But now we’re going to do the recovery, which can take longer than you think because the meniscus is made out of cartilage.

And cartilage is one of the slowest healing tissues in the body. And on top of that, that cartilage that we’re asking to heal is between two weight bearing bones. So it’s just going to take some time. And as you become more active, inevitably, you’re going to hit a flare up, or two or many. And when you hit those flare ups, it delays your healing time a bit.

So in the perfect world, if you do everything absolutely perfectly, right, two to three months is the low end of what it might take to recover. But most people take six to even 12 months to get over their meniscus surgery and get their knee feeling normal again. So make sure you’re patient with the timeframes.

Don’t beat yourself up. If there’s healthcare professionals telling you, hey, it’s been two months, you shouldn’t be doing X, Y and Z by now. Why are you still in a crutch or a cane, it’s been three months, but you’re hanging your feet for hours a day, you just taking the cane along with you, you’re getting better that’s you want to track if you’re continuously improving, making incremental improvements week to week.

Even though they’re not massive improvements, you’re not dancing by three months out, that’s okay, as long as you’re better than two weeks ago and a month ago, if you note that you’re improving gradually, gradually like that, then you’re on track and be okay with taking six even 12 months to get over your meniscus surgery.

And tip number seven is increase your understanding of how the meniscus heals. This is my challenge to you to take responsibility and stop giving all the responsibility to healthcare professionals, it’s really easy to show up for a procedure, go under the anesthesia, have your meniscus surgery done and pop out on the other side wake up. And then you know you have to go to the rehab after that.

But what you didn’t learn is how to fix the root problem, the gotcha the meniscus tear in the first place. And that’s your responsibility. At the end of the day. No surgeon can do that for you. No surgery is going to fix a muscle imbalance for you, you’ve got to understand how the pressures work in the knee, what muscles influence the pressures in the knee, how your feet might be part of the problem, there’s so many factors to consider.

And truthfully, it’s way too much for one YouTube video or even a single doctor’s appointment. When we have patients here in our clinic, I have to spread out the information over the course of treatment over two to three months or more, depending on how much time they’re here for according to their plan.

Now I’ve uploaded tons of videos here on YouTube for you to learn from. So you’re welcome to go check those out. There’s links in the description below. Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve even made a program called the knee meniscus recovery program. And that is an exhaustive program that takes you through all the steps of recovering your meniscus, whether you’ve had surgery or not, because the principles are the same for both situations.

In both situations, the meniscus needs to heal. And you’ve got to fix the underlying root muscle imbalance so that you don’t end up with meniscus problems again in the future, or even worse in osteoarthritis problem in your knee, which is what most meniscus problems morph into if you don’t fix that underlying root problem, this program, the knee meniscus recovery program is designed to be very educational, there’s definitely exercises in the program.

But there’s a heck of a lot of teaching so that you can understand so you can increase your understanding of how the meniscus heals and how to keep it healthy for the long term. Because if you don’t go through this process of understanding how to keep your meniscus healthy, then it’s going to haunt you for the rest of your life potentially, it’s going to eventually turn into a knee osteoarthritis problem.

And then potentially a knee replacement. And I can’t tell you how many patients I’ve treated over the years that are coming in with pain after they’ve had a knee replacement. And they got the knee replacement because they had knee arthritis. And if you track back to before they had knee arthritis, they had a meniscus injury.

They’ve even had a meniscus surgery. And before that they’ve had knee pain even before then. So there’s been a root problem that’s been falling them all along. And even though they may have had a meniscus surgery and now knee replacement surgery and osteoarthritis along the way, and before all that a meniscus tear, they haven’t learned how to fix the root problem.

And you can avoid all the headaches of re injuring your meniscus tear developing osteoarthritis and having an unnecessary knee replacement later on in life if you simply put in the effort and work to learn how to take care of your knees for the long term. So however you do it, whether you do our program or watch our channel or you find somebody else that’s very helpful in increasing your knowledge about the meniscus in overall knee Health.

Do that so that you can get as knowledgeable about this process as possible. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you liked it, give it a thumbs up please share it with somebody you think needs to see this, please subscribe and turn on your notifications so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos we post every single week. I’ll catch you in the next video. Bye