Can A Torn ACL Heal Without Knee Surgery?

Are you wondering if it’s possible to heal a torn ACL, an anterior cruciate ligament, in a knee without knee surgery? We had a client in this week who asked us exactly this. So I decided to talk about it today on this video. And what I want to tell you is that it is possible to heal without surgery in most circumstances. There are a few things to consider, and I’m going to go into that with you today.

Real quick, my name is Dr. David Middaugh. I’m a specialist physical therapist from El Paso manual physical therapy. I’ve been helping out people with knee problems for years. And I’ve seen many ACL cases, specifically people that are looking to avoid having a knee surgery. We see these cases here in our clinic. And what we find is all the cases we’ve taken on they have been able to heal without surgery.

The worst case I’ve ever seen, I got to tell you this story, it was a woman she was in her 30s she fell down some stairs at a stadium. And when I got her into the clinic, I was checking her ligaments, the way that we do the tests, the same way that surgeons do the test, we do the same test here in the clinic, and found that her ligament did not feel like it was connected. I told her, I’m not an MRI machine, and she went and got an MRI.

They determined that it was torn, and they were recommending a surgery for her, but she was adamant about attempting to not have the surgery going through the treatment to see if she could avoid it. And I told her let’s give it a few weeks, let’s literally go three weeks, three treatments, let’s see if we can get the swelling under control and make sure that the ligament is healing. And if it’s not, please go have a surgery.

Because based on her situation, it would have been good, if it did not heal the way that it healed. But the good news is, three visits into it, doing the same tests where we check the ligaments, she was actually feeling better. Her ligament felt like it had a connection again, and me not being an MRI machine and not being able to look on the inside, which would be surgery, obviously, we don’t want to do that. And that’s not something that I do.

Likely, it’s very likely that her ligament was stretched out potentially partially torn. It’s hard to know for sure if it was a full ACL tear. But the fact is that her ligament healed, she was able to have a normal ligament feel instead of her knee joint doing our tests. And most importantly, the swelling went down, she got back to being active, she got off the crutches eventually, it took her a few months but she was able to get back to normal everyday walking without concern or fear that her knee was going to buckle or give out or that she was going to have some sort of problem.

So it is possible to heal an ACL without knee surgery. But let me go into the mechanism just kind of how this works. The mechanics of it all because it may seem kind of strange or rare, like that was a one-off situation. But we see it happen here in the clinic where people get different types of ACL tears. And I want to tell you more about that.

The different types, the big one that people get surgery for is a full ACL tear. Now, most of the time you can spot these a mile away. The person’s knee is just not getting better even after a couple of weeks. They aren’t able to walk obviously their knee is stuck. It doesn’t bend or straighten out all the way it hurts, it’s swollen. You can’t put pressure on the leg.

It’s pretty obvious and usually along with the ACL tear whenever whatever the injury was, whether it was a sports accident, a motor accident, like a you know car accident, bicycle accident or motorcycle accident, or some other accident where the knee was injured severely.

There are almost always other things involved like a meniscus tear, other ligaments torn besides the ACL, like the MCL or the LCL or the PCL, another ligament that is more rarely torn in the knee. So it’s a massive trauma to the knee in those situations.

Likely surgery is going to be a good thing to make sure that the knee joint is stable, and you can confidently move forward without being worried that you’re going to have problems in the knee. Now, you know those when you see him like I said, a more manageable case without surgeries is what we would call a partial ACL tear.

Now in these, there’s obviously some swelling still difficulty walking. It hurts the people that haven’t think that it’s the worst pain ever usually, you know second and childbirth or passing a kidney stone, but it’s still there’s still more motion the knee. The ligament when we do our tests has some attachment to it. It’s usually a really bad sprain is kind of the better way to think about it.

In these cases, they are extremely manageable without surgery, they can get better. And then a lesser degree would be just a knee sprain, a twisted your knee stepped funny or somebody bumped into you or a sports injury that wasn’t that bad in those cases it is much quicker to get over the knee injury. And most of times people can straighten out and bend their knee all the way and get back to walking, no problem even running without too many issues in the knee.

So depending on what level of knee ACL injury there is, it has to be determined by a healthcare professional, obviously, that most people will go see their physician or an orthopedic surgeon to figure this out, they’ll do an MRI, and we’ll go through that whole process. Here in the clinic, we screen people as well, we can check them out, you know, on the first visit, and see if it’s something that, hey, this is for surgery, for sure. Everything looks like it’s involved here, go talk to the surgeon.

And we tell people just like I told that woman, she already had an MRI, but had she not I would have told her right off the bat. I said I’m not touching it until you go get an MRI and we determine the likelihood that this is going to get better or not without surgery based on how bad it was. But if it is a manageable case, and we can tell our patients that right away the first visit the first time that they see us, here’s what’s typically done for them.

Here is the process for healing a knee ACL injury without knee surgery. The first thing we do is put them in a brace. So if you’re watching this video right now, and you think you have an ACL injury or some ligament injury, you need to be in a knee brace and I’m talking a serious knee brace not like the neoprene the stretchy ones that just have the hole for the knee. And that’s all it is just a sleeve that you put on, you need something with some brackets on the side, some metal or stiff, durable plastic brackets, usually with hinges.

The reason for that is because if you’ve injured a ligament in your knee, the purpose of a ligament is to connect bones together and the ligaments in the knee, connect your thigh bone to your shin bone. And if those aren’t connected, well every time you go take a step, that knee joint is going to move around excessively, it’s not going to be stable. And having those brackets with that sleeve allows you to be more stable so that you can get around and do normal stuff.

If that ligament is injured, and that knee is jostling around a little too much during everyday motions that inside lining of a knee joint, the ligaments and cartilage, the remaining ligaments are connected in the cartilage of the meniscus and seven eight can become irritated, and the swelling can be there longer than is necessary. And it can delay healing of the ligament. So first thing that I do with all our clients here that have some sort of ligament problem is we have to brace some with a significant brace.

And the next question that comes after we do that is the point that the clients will always ask, how long do I wear the brace? Is it a month, two months, three months, how many weeks? My answer to that is always as long as it takes. I mean if you’re looking to avoid surgery, if they recommended two months, and you’re getting better, as long as two months go along, and it’s not done yet it’s still needing to be in the brace will stay in the brace another month or two or three months however long it takes as long as there’s progress being made.

It could be that it takes six months to a year. If you can avoid surgery and there’s consistent progress being made where the brace as long as you need to buy a second or third brace if the if that one gives out it’s totally worth the 50 to $100 you spent on the brace compared to the thousands and thousands of you’ll spend on a surgery that you might not have even needed. And most of the time, on average, we see clients that will be anywhere from the three to six months of range using the knee brace as long as they’re putting it on when they’re supposed to and not taking it off when they’re not supposed to.

Usually we wean out of the brace we start to have days where without it and days with is certain activities you must wear just to make sure you have the protection and stability from the brace. And there’s other activity activities where we start telling people you can start to get out of the brace just be cautious and careful and make sure that you are moving like we’ve discussed. Now leading to that it’s not just the brace, we have to go through treatment here.

So there’s alignment issues that happen in the of course the swelling is a big problem. And then if this accident that led up to the ligament, the ACL injury, if there was an accident that involved the individual, in other words, how they were moving, if it was bad movement, if they landed wrong, and that kind of happens frequently, if they roll their ankle all the time, and that’s what led to the fall, we have to fix that underlying problem so that there’s less likelihood that they’re going to roll their ankle or twist or leg or take a bad step again, and re injure the ligament. Because you’re healing it with scar tissue.

When it heals is not the original tissue and scar tissue which is still good 70 to 80% as strong as the original tissue, which is much better than nothing or even a partial tear and most people can get along just fine with that Plus, it’s you’re able to fortify the strength of that as you exercise it properly.

We always encourage our clients that are at the end of their care for an ACL tear an ACL injury. To strengthen, we actually have them begin to weight lift so that they can protect all of you the ligaments compensate the strength by increasing the integrity of what it is that they’re increasing the density, the thickness, the durability of the other ligaments, and the one that tilled so that they’re overly strong in case they do have another spill or some other accident, so that it is possible to heal it and make it even stronger than it was before.

Now, most ACL injuries that we see involve accidents like car accidents, but there are a lot of sports injuries, football, volleyball, basketball, soccer, the most common one, soccer is the most common one that we see here in the clinic, of people twisting their knees might be male might be female, there is research that suggests that more females get ACL tears and males, but we do see plenty of males that get ACL injuries.

But the good News, the news that you need to make sure that you understand before having any sort of knee surgery for your ACL repair is that it can heal naturally, the biggest factors to consider is what do you plan to do in the future, if you plan to go play professional sports or, or even collegiate sports or do some sort of competitive sports, because you like to just be in that environment, and you’re kind of in a rush to get back, you don’t want to wait too long, then going through surgery might be the better option.

Now, the waiting too long thing is kind of a tossup because we do have people get back to normal activities, sometimes within six months, which is shorter than the timeframe that you’d be back to 100%. If you had surgery, having surgery, you are looking at a year, it’s usually your recovery to get back to 100%. On the short end, you’re looking at nine months.

But if you’re the type of person that just wants to be able to move, do your usual daily routine, workout a little bit to stay fit, you’re not necessarily competitive or trying to be in a competitive sport situation. The likelihood of you recovering your knee from your knee injury and getting back to doing things that you were doing before, without your ACL getting worse or re-injuring it or making some other injury happen inside your knee is really good.

It is very possible for you to heal the ACL injury and get back to being active, healthy and mobile without having to have an unnecessary ACL surgery. Now there are lots of cases of athletes that have had surgery that have had ACL tears without having surgery. You can google those you can look those up. For validation, it is very possible, I just want to make that clear. Because typically when you go see an orthopedic surgeon and you have a pretty good ACL tear, as long as there’s not a whole lot of other parts of the knee involved.

They might be recommending having an ACL surgery, it isn’t common knowledge yet, in the medical community that it’s possible to avoid having the surgery and heal naturally through the right type of treatment. That’s non operative.

Well, hey, if you thought this video was helpful for you, and you’re considering the possibility of hiring us to help you with your torn ACL, at least take a look and see if it’s possible to heal it without surgery. Here’s what you got to do. Go up to the top of our website here and find the cost and availability button. Hit that and then you will get taken to a page where you can leave us your details about you and your knee problem.

We want to hear as much as we can about you one of my staff will call you back once that that info is submitted. And we just want to talk with you to make sure that it’s the type of ACL problem that we can help because if not want to not waste your time and make sure you get to the right person so you can get the help that you need. Once you talk to them, they’ll be able to tell you the next steps to take to fixing your knee problem without surgery. Okay, have a wonderful day.