Chondromalacia Patella vs Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome

Chondromalacia patella vs patellofemoral pain syndrome, both are pain behind the kneecap on the front side of the knee joints. But what the heck is the difference between the two? Well, in today’s video, I’m going to clearly explain the difference. And I’m also going to give you insight as to the root problem that both of these conditions share, so that you can start to figure out how to help yourself in the long term.

So you can avoid some serious problems, avoid having to rely on medications, injections, and so you can definitely avoid having an unnecessary knee surgery. So let’s get right into it. Let me tell you the way to think about patellofemoral pain syndrome and Chondromalacia patella.

Here in this picture, I’ve got three conditions listed patellofemoral pain syndrome Chondromalacia patella, here in blue, and knee osteoarthritis on the far end. Think of these as being on a spectrum. Depending on your age. If you suffer from knee problems, depending on your age, you probably fall into one of these categories.

So if you’re watching this video right now, and you’re 16-17, or even in your 20s, and you’re having knee problems, and maybe you haven’t been to the doctor yet or you haven’t had an x ray, then you’re probably going to have patellofemoral pain syndrome, if it’s pain the front side of your knee joints.

Typically, once people hit their 30s and 40s, then they end up going to the doctor they get an x ray and that’s when they have Chondromalacia patella, and if it keeps going on into their 50s and 60s, that’s when the X ray begins to show signs of knee osteoarthritis. B

ut one of the easiest ways to begin to differentiate patellofemoral pain syndrome and Chondromalacia patella is that they’re on this spectrum and patellofemoral pain syndrome is not as severe as Chondromalacia patella. And there’s also this point here where they kind of overlap in symptoms.

And same happens over here between Chondromalacia, patella and knee osteoarthritis. And there’s other problems that I didn’t list in here, like meniscus injuries and the knee ligament injuries like ACL injuries, MCL problems and other conditions as well that I didn’t put intentionally because I’m trying to simplify this as much as possible for you. And let’s talk more about patellofemoral pain syndrome.

If you’ve got patellofemoral pain syndrome, chances are you’re younger in your years, and you’re active. You are involved in some running sports, soccer, jumping sports as well like basketball, you do track cross country or you just a fit, healthy active individual. Maybe you don’t even go do organized sports be like to walk a lot or hike a lot.

That can also lead to patellofemoral pain syndrome. And what’s happening in the joint. Let me tell you the root problem here is the kneecap. So this is the right knee. Here’s your fibula, here’s your tibia. Here’s the thigh bone, the femur, and your kneecap is inside this tissue layer. This is supposed to be the quad muscle tendon.

And then it turns into a ligament that connects your kneecap to your shin bone here at the bottom, the kneecap is right back in there. And if the kneecap rubs inappropriately against the thigh bone as the knee joint bends, then it begins to irritate the tissues back there. And at first when your younger years 20s and younger.

It just shows up as knee pain. See cartilage is very resilient. And you might even still be growing in your definitely your teenage years, but even into your 20s Some people are still growing. So having signs show up on an x ray of degeneration is highly unlikely but that doesn’t mean that you don’t already have the muscle imbalance problem that’s causing too much excessive pressure on your kneecap right there.

It just hasn’t had enough time to develop into the visible degeneration on an x ray MRI, like Contra Malaysia, patella or knee osteoarthritis. Another condition that youngsters get teenagers especially is something called Osgoode slaughters disease. Now this is when the bump on the front of the knee below the kneecap.

So kneecaps up here, more on the shin bone, there’s a bump, everybody has a little bit of a bump there where that ligament attaches to. It starts to thicken and stick out it protrudes outwards, and it can get very tender. Very often doctors patients that go to the doctor, it’s usually a high school athlete showing up at the doctor’s office saying my knee hurts right here.

The doctor will pull up their the pant leg and look at the patient’s knee and they’ll say oh, you have Osgoode slaughters disease and then they say this. You’re growing you have growing pains. And that to me is the biggest wastebasket diagnosis because there’s nothing that they give you to do.

They simply just say take some pain medication rest a bit stretch and you’ll grow out of it. And what is happening, the problem that is causing that Osgoode solders is the same issue that’s causing the patellofemoral pain syndrome up here, there’s too much strength in the quad muscles, you have an imbalance and relative to the other muscles like the in the thigh and even up in the hip, that quad muscles getting pulled too much.

And it’s pulling the kneecap against the thigh bone, and it’s yanking on this tendon right here, which then yanks on the bone, stretching the bone and because you’re young and still growing and your bones are still kind of pliable, that bone is going to start to grow outwards and protrude.

So it is a huge sign that you’ve got a muscle imbalance if you’ve got patellofemoral pain syndrome and also tenderness down here where the tendon attaches, and you’re developing Osgoode solders disease, you need to fix your muscle imbalance immediately. And if your doctor said that you have growing pains.

I’m sorry, I need to strongly disagree with that growing pains are an excuse for not looking good enough as to what the root cause of the problem is. Now let’s say you make it past your 20s and it overlaps so you could get Chondromalacia patella, you know what you’re 26 years old still. But by the time you get Chondromalacia patella very often people have been dealing with knee pain. Maybe they got Osgoode slaughters disease, and it’s calmed down.

Because you know what happens after high school, your life changes you get into a career, and you maybe aren’t as active as you were before. So your knees kind of change your knees might actually be a little bit healthier.

But then if you get back into exercise, if that imbalance is still there, it’s exposed again, and it starts to now irritate the cartilage even further, but because you’re not growing anymore, and depending on your level of activity, you might actually begin to wear down the cartilage and compress it excessively causing that Chondromalacia patella problem in Chondromalacia patella.

What you’re going to have done is when you go to the doctor’s office, the doctor is going to of course know your age. And so they’re already going to be thinking, Oh, this person’s at high risk for contribution patella, and they’re telling me their knee pain is in the front of their knee, they’re going to do an x ray with your knee bent like this, and the X ray camera looking this way.

Because you’re trying to look under your kneecap at the spacing between the kneecap and the thigh bone. And they’re also looking at the alignment. If you can see right here, let me get the angle just right, there you go. You see there’s a groove on the thigh bone right there. And then there’s a bumper, it’s congruent.

They’re like the kneecap just fits in that space nicely. They want to know if the alignments Right Is it is it off to the side inside this way or is it off to the side outside, it should be generally right in the middle so that when you bend and straighten your knee, that kneecap glides within the groove on the thigh bone, I’ll show you what that looks like. On my other model here.

So when I bend the knee joint here, that kneecap that’s in there should sit in the groove as the knee bends. And so the theory behind Kandra emulation patella This is and I don’t agree with this, but this is just the mainstream thinking amongst healthcare providers. When you go see your doctor, I’m telling you this so that you can be prepared.

They’re thinking that the patella is moved off to the side because your quad muscles aren’t strong enough. Another line of thinking is that it’s age related that it’s the beginning signs of osteoarthritis, I told you to the spectrum. And so doctors don’t offer a whole lot of solutions that are going to fix you for the long term. So they kind of just leave you with their typical, you know, here’s some pain medications.

If you if you want prescription strength, pain medications, we can offer you that if you’re a good fit for it, we can offer injections. And in rare circumstances, surgeries are offered for Chondromalacia patella, but what often happens is people just back off of exercising, they back off of the activity that set off their contribution, patella, and so it calms down.

So even though you have a muscle imbalance presence, if you’re just not using your joint very much, it’s kind of manageable and tolerable. But then you run into other health problems, like maybe your weight isn’t managed, or you just are overall unhealthy.

And what tends to happen is given another decade or two in life, and then people start saying, you know, I need to get active again, I better start walking or maybe I’m facing retirement now and have a little more time on my hands and I want to get to doing those projects that I hadn’t been able to do. And I was stuck in a desk for the last 40 years.

So life changes and inevitably people get back to moving their knee joints again, more often they’re used to and if that muscle imbalance, that root problem was never corrected, then it’s exposed again. And if you’re in your 50s or 60s at this point or beyond 70s or 80s and beyond, then you’re going to land in the osteoarthritis range.

So of course, in knee osteoarthritis, you go to the doctor, they’re going to take an x ray, and they’ll be able to tell you off the X ray, the severity of knee osteoarthritis, and you have, they’ll be looking at the quality of the space between the thigh bone. And the shin bone right here, as well is the same kneecap and thigh bone observation that they were looking at with the other x ray for Chondromalacia patella.

And at this point, it’s a little far gone, you know, the, you can still get a lot better, I’ve got tons of videos to talk about knee arthritis. But there’s, it would have been nice if we would have caught you when you were in your teenage years, or at least your 20s or 30s, or 40s, so that it doesn’t have to progress that far, you’re not dealing with the problems of knee osteoarthritis.

So now keep in mind that treatments are symptom based for this throughout the medical field. So you’re going to be offered over the counter pain medications that first like Tylenol and ibuprofen, then if that doesn’t work, the doctor is going to say, well, here’s some prescription string pain medication for your knees. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll say come back in a month, and we’ll give you an injection.

And if that doesn’t work, then they’re going to say let’s send you to an orthopedic surgeon for a consultation, they might try different types of injections or other therapies, they might send you to physical therapy.

And if you do go to physical therapy, you’re probably going to land in a clinic because this is just the majority of the clinics out there that they specialize in treating people after surgery. And they tend to focus on strengthening the quad muscles because that’s appropriate for somebody who’s had a knee surgery.

Most of the time quad muscles shut down and exercising them right after having a knee surgery is extremely appropriate. But if you’ve never had a surgery, you have to tell a femoral pain syndrome, and you’re 20 or 25 or and or you’ve got conundrum relation patella and you’re in your 30s and you haven’t had a surgery looking to avoid it and you show up in a clinic where they mainly treat people with knee replacements and knee meniscus repairs, chances are that physical therapist is just not going to quite understand how to help you out.

And they may reflexively put you in the same exercises that every other knee patient there is going through, which means you’re going to be doing quad strengthening. And as I’ve already been alluding to talking about, if you get your quad stronger, it’s only going to compress your kneecap further against your thigh bone.

And it’s only going to stretch this this tendon down here and it’s going to make your situation worse. So you need to stay away from quad muscle strengthening. I’m talking about the muscles in the front of your thigh here because they attach to that kneecap. You don’t need to be strengthening these muscles.

If you’ve got Chondromalacia patella or patellofemoral pain syndrome. In fact, you’ve got to work out the glute muscles very often because that is what shuts off the quad muscles relatively and creates a more normal mechanics throughout the hip and the thigh and the knee and all the way down to the foot so that the pressures alleviated in your kneecap and the tendons and ligaments around and between these two bones right here, the thigh bone and the shin bone.

And that way you have an excellent chance at healing and never needing surgery and not having to rely on injections or pain medications. You’ve got to make sure you get the right types of exercise. Now I’ve got exercises listed in the description below glute exercises, there’s videos with showing you good exercises for people that are dealing with knee problems.

And you should really consider learning more about our 28 Day knee health and wellness boost program because that’s a much more comprehensive program on treating the root imbalance that sets up patellofemoral pain syndrome Chondromalacia, patella and knee osteoarthritis now knee osteoarthritis is a bit more complex. So we have another program just for that.

But if you’re in patellofemoral pain syndrome or constellation patella, the 28 Day Knee Health And Wellness Boost Program is something that you want to check out and see if it’s right for you. There’s a link in the description below for that. Hey, thanks for watching hope this video was helpful for you share with somebody that needs to see this and please subscribe to our channel and give us a like as well. I’ll see you in the next video. Bye