8 Problems That Might Happen If A Meniscus Tear Is Ignored

Suffering a meniscus tear can be scary and worrisome. Besides painful too many people with a torn meniscus end up putting it off especially the pain begins to improve. But the fact that you’ve got a torn meniscus is a sign of a deeper rooted problem that could be festering and setting you up for worse problems in the coming months, or years. In this video, I’m going to share with you the top eight worst problems that might happen if a meniscus tear is ignored.

Number one is probably the most obvious the meniscus tear can worsen. Here’s the meniscus right here. It’s this blue structure in my knee model. And you can see that it’s right between the thigh bone and the shin bone. So it acts as a cushion between the two bones.

So all your body weight above the thigh bone is being cushioned by that little meniscus right there and you have a pair, you have one on each side. And if you don’t take the actions necessary to decompress your meniscus, and you just keep living life as normal, even though it might have improved.

Because you might have taken some time off, gotten off your feet stopped doing that activity that may have aggravated it, it may have improved in swelling and pain and discomfort, you may get all your motion back.

But there’s still a tear there, which is a sign there’s something else going on. That other thing that could be going on, it’s usually a root muscle imbalance. That’s adding too much compression to the knee joint that ends up tearing the meniscus.

Number two is knee stiffness. As that compression builds up, it pushes the bones on each other and squashes the meniscus more. So the joint mobility just begins to reduce and there’s stiffness in the knee, it’s harder to bend it and straighten it compared to the other knee or how it was before you had the meniscus tear, that irritation that happens as you compress the meniscus and try to move with it causes swelling, which also can lead to stiffness because if you got extra fluid in the joint, it just doesn’t move as easy as if it had the normal amount of fluid.

Also, that extra compression now is rubbing the meniscus. And once you’ve frayed the meniscus or squashed it down, rubbed it away enough. Now you’re going to end up rubbing the cartilage on the end of the bone right here against the top of the shin bone. And that can also decrease the mechanics in the joints and cause stiffness as well.

Number three is losing motion in your knee. Especially if you’ve had this for three months or more if it’s been three months, with a lack of being able to straighten out your knee, your knees bent like this, where you can bend it more than a certain amount of doesn’t want to bend all the way it only bends partially compared to your other knee, then there’s a greater chance that you’re going to keep those changes more permanently or more long term.

But if you have a loss of motion early on within the first few months, especially the first month, then it’s a lot easier to get that motion back, the loss of motion is affected by two factors, usually, the first is that the meniscus has shifted, see that blue thing, it’s actually very flexible and has a lot of mobility inside the joint.

And once it’s torn, it doesn’t want to stay in the same place all the time. So it may have shifted. And that shifted meniscus now is going to block normal mechanics or normal motion of the joint. And so it’s kind of like an obstruction to the joint.

And the second thing that contributes to a loss of motion in the joint is if you already have arthritis, or this has been going on long enough for you to begin to develop early stages of arthritis in your knee, then that means that the end of this bone is no longer as smooth as it should be.

And so the egg, the rough edges of this bone right here could be catching on the frayed edges of the meniscus. So even if it’s in position, because you have a tear now that you have extra edges within the meniscus, that are catching the bumpy surfaces of the end of the thigh bone here. So that can also contribute to a loss of motion in the knee joint.

Inside note in case you’re getting clicking your knee from a meniscus tear, this is probably why you’re getting clicking because the edges are catching on the arthritis or the meniscus is moving around and causing a clunking noise inside your knee. As long as it doesn’t hurt. It’s technically okay, but we need to be fixing that root problems.

So that is so that this isn’t getting worse as time goes on. I’m giving you these in order of progression. So the first one is the first problem that comes on and then each of these problems are going to get worse and worse as they go on. The fourth one is getting aches and pains in other parts of your body as the meniscus injury goes on.

Even if it gets a little bit better, inevitably you get back to doing things that you normally were before and if you’re not prepared to do it, well, you’re going to aggravate that meniscus potentially cause some swelling, and that might put you in a situation where you end up limping more.

Or if you’ve flirted up a few times, then you kind of know what flares you up and you start to baby that knee and use the other leg more this leads to potentially more knee pain on the good side. And it can also cause problems in the hips, the low back even your ankles and feet.

And it’s common to get these pain problems to develop in other sites besides your injured knee that has a meniscus tear within a month or two after suffering your first big symptoms from your meniscus tear.

Number five is having a meniscus surgery Eventually this gets so bad people get fed up that now their other knees hurting their hips, hurting the knees swelling with easier and easier activities. So they’re having to do less and less of their normal activities. So they end up talking to the surgeon. And of course, the surgeons job is to do surgery. So that’s often what they recommend.

And they’ll typically do their due diligence and have you tried cortisone injections, try physical therapy, try other non surgical options before going into surgery. And some surgeons just skip all that and go straight to surgery too.

But having surgery we’re finding out in more recent medical research is not always the best solution because it tends to speed up the process of getting osteoarthritis. And they’re not always successful. Oftentimes, they leave people feeling worse after the surgery than before. So there’s a lot of complications that could happen from getting a meniscus surgery.

And now there are cases of people that have a meniscus surgery and feel fantastic afterwards. But you don’t know which side you’re going to land on the good you feel great side, the good side or the I have more problems side. Number six is the wrong exercises that make the meniscus worse.

Now let’s say you went to physical therapy to do exercises or you looked up exercises or maybe your doctor recommended exercises to you they printed something out and gave you some to do. Very often these exercises are developed by people that are not specialists in preventing surgery.

So they tend to focus on doing exercises that get the thigh muscles stronger, the quad muscles on the front of the thigh above the knee. And then the ones on the back of the thigh, the hamstring muscles, and they’re giving you these exercises with great intent, they truly want to help you out, they’re doing the best they can with what they know.

But if they’re giving you these exercises, chances are they just had not gone through specialized training to help people prevent getting a meniscus tear problem worse over time, because we’ve got to depressurize the meniscus in order to give it a chance to heal. And doing Thigh Exercises like quad and hamstring exercises tends to pressurize the meniscus more and make it worse over time.

Now, this is a huge problem that we see here in our clinic and our clients online. Because very often they’ve seen health care professionals that have recommended doing these type exercises. And they’re confused because you’re thinking, well, one doctor is telling me to do this, and another doctor is telling me to do that. And the physical therapist told me to do this. And somebody else told me to do that I’m getting mixed answers from everybody.

What the heck do I do what’s going to help me avoid surgery, I always tell our clients to put it to the test. Ultimately, you know, I might be wrong. And that’s, that’s fine, I want you to prove me wrong.

Because ultimately I want you to find out what works for you. You’ve got to listen to your knee. And if you’re doing quad exercises and hamstring exercises and your knees just getting worse over time, maybe not in the moment, right when you’re doing the exercise very often it does hurt right when you do the exercise.

But in later days, like later on that day or the next few days afterwards. If your knee is not improving week to week for sure, then that program is not beneficial for you. It should not be hurting to do exercises, unless you’ve had surgery. That’s a different case. But if you’re trying to prevent a surgery, exercises should feel great on your knees.

And you should technically be working out your glute muscles, way more than your thigh muscles. That’s what we recommend working out the glute muscles is part of that root muscle imbalance. And we talk all about that in a program that I want to tell you about. It’s called the knee meniscus recovery program.

It’s an online program that you can access anytime you want, as long as you got an internet connection, and a mobile device or a laptop or computer, and it’s a comprehensive program that takes you through all the steps to fix the root muscle imbalance that sets up meniscus tears and ultimately prevents you from developing osteoarthritis.

If you implement it. Well, you can learn more about this program in the link in the description below. And by the way, I’ve also linked all our meniscus videos in a playlist. And you’ll find that in the description below as well.

Number seven, developing knee osteoarthritis, we’re finding out in the medical research more and more that you’re more likely to develop knee osteoarthritis if you have a meniscus tear. And the way to look at this is put them on a spectrum.

In other words, if you have a meniscus tear, then as long as the same root problem is there, you’re on your way to eventually developing knee osteoarthritis if you don’t fix that root muscle imbalance. And the reason is clear that meniscus is the cushion between the thigh bone and the shin bone.

And so if you over compress it and wear it down, then all you have left is the cartilage left on the end of your thigh bone, and then that eventually gets worn down and that’s how you develop knee osteoarthritis.

And that leads to the Final Problem number eight here is having a knee replacement. Now this is usually years out for somebody who’s had a meniscus tear. I mean like a decade or more typically that’s how long their knees last.

But I think about the quality of life People have during those 10 years as they approach the necessity for, but I think about the quality of life as people go through those years to get to the point where they feel like they need to have their knee replaced, they’re miserable.

I hear from patients all the time I avoid going to this store, I avoid doing this with my family, I haven’t been able to go on a sightseeing vacation tour, because I can’t stand for too long. Because my knee starts to swell and hurt.

They’ve molded their life around the limitations of their knee. And if you simply fix the root problem, you can expand those limitations possibly even get rid of them completely, and enjoy your life. And maybe never ever need to have a knee replacement surgery because your osteoarthritis has gotten so bad, because that started back when you got your knee meniscus tear.

And many people that ended up getting a knee replacement, they have the wrong mindset about it, because they’re thinking that this is going to fix all their problems, when in reality, getting a knee replacement only takes away the knee arthritis and it gets rid of the meniscus technically, so you can’t get a meniscus tear anymore.

But it doesn’t fix that root muscle imbalance. And I’ve seen so many people end up with a knee replacement and still have pain afterwards, sometimes worse than the pain they had before the knee replacement. And it goes back to that root muscle imbalance there’s still over dominant and certain muscles and weak and other muscles. And now that’s tensioning other parts of their knee that have not been replaced, and that’s causing them pain at this time.

So the most prudent thing to do for your future to have the best quality of life is to address that root muscle imbalance so that you can give your meniscus a chance to heal and avoid developing knee arthritis. And of course, avoiding the replacement altogether have got videos with exercises and other tips for meniscus problems.

Go find that playlist in the description below. And you can also learn more about that knee meniscus recovery program through that link below in the description. Thanks so much for watching.

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