How To Break Up Painful Scar Tissue To Help Heal After A Knee Replacement

In this video I’m going to tell you how to break up scar tissue to help heal after a knee replacement. Scar tissue is often thought of as a mysterious thing that kind of just happens after an injury or especially a surgery. And not many people know what to do about it, how to treat it or even know that it’s part of the problem.

Even the health care professionals see it this way, because they’re not really sure what treatments to do besides rubbing Vitamin E lotion on it to make the scar prettier. But if it’s causing you a problem, like limited motion, pain, or swelling, then there’s certain things that need to be done. And you can do them at home on your own.

Especially if you’re recovering from a knee replacement surgery, I’ll clearly show you exactly what to do. But first, let me just teach you a bit about how scar tissue works so that you can understand why we’re doing what I’m going to show you today. On this chart here, I’ve got the different layers of tissues at your knee joint.

So on the very top layer here we’ve got skin, then right below the skin, there’s a layer of fat, everybody’s got a thin layer of fat and some people thicker, some people thinner, then between the skin and fat and kind of infused into it as well, our blood vessels and nerves I’ve drawn the nerves here in purple and the blood vessels in red.

Then right below that on your knee, you’ve got a joint capsule, that’s that blue line, and then you’ve got the joints. And depending on exactly where you are in the knee, you might have bone like the kneecap. For instance, when you have a knee replacement done, the surgeon has to make an incision, where they cut in here to get down to the bone.

And they’re opening you up, they pull apart all these tissues in order to access into the joint, they open up the joint and they of course saw parts of the bone off in order to install the artificial parts that are going to make up your knee replacement. But after the surgery is done, this incision needs to heal.

So what your body naturally does, it’s a beautiful miracle is it begins to stitch the edges together with something called scar tissue. That way you can have that filled in and you’re not leaking anything you’re not leaking blood or any fluids. And there’s no nothing exposed from the inside of your body to the outside and things can get in this process takes about a few weeks at most a month.

On the slower end, you’re talking like six to eight weeks for the skin to heal, for everything to close up. Right after surgery, you’re going to have to baby an incision and make sure that it closes up scabs over and then you have a nice little scar at the surface level where the skin is.

Now the problem with scar tissue is that it’s a lot like superglue because it’s bluing the edges of the incision or the opening in your skin and all the other tissues together in order to make sure that everything’s closed up. The issue is that scar tissue is its own tissue. It’s not exactly like skin, or fat or nerves or blood vessels or any of the other tissues.

It’s a variation of the original tissue. And it’s designed to be at about 70% as strong as your original tissue, it may not have the same function either it may not act like normal nerves or normal blood cells. But it’s a workaround that your body does in order to be functional.

When it comes to healing properly after the knee replacements so that you’re not getting swelling, pain and irritation, we have to make sure that the nerves here and the blood vessels are moving properly in the scar tissue.

Because often what happens is it gets kinked up or it gets stuck or entrapped in the scar tissue. And if that motion doesn’t happen the way it’s supposed to, then you can run into problems. And now to illustrate this just a bit if you think about the back of your head, because that’s usually a very easy place for people to look at.

Your skin moves very freely in the back of your hand. And you can kind of feel right below that that there’s bones, tendons, blood vessels, other things just like I’ve drawn you on the description here. But if you move the skin, it moves independently of the tissues below the bone, the nerves, the blood vessels, everything there, it moves separate.

So all these layers, going back to the chart here should have some independent movement from each other. They’re stuck together for sure they’re attached, but they need to have some freedom of motion.

If that freedom of motion is restricted somehow that you can get irritation at certain levels. And that can cause pain, swelling, and if it’s your nerves, it can cause nerve pain as well. Down at the deepest levels, the way that you can get movement to happen between the bone and the joint capsule and the layer right above it where the blood vessels and nerves are, is through exercise through certain stretches.

Those are typically done naturally as you get your movement back after the knee replacement. But to get these top layers to move, exercise might not be the only thing that you need. You might need to be massaging the scar tissue right over the incision.

So if you look at your knee joint and there’s an incision right over it just like that, you’re going to have to get the skin right on top of your knee and move it around and get it to move independently from the tissues below. And you might feel as you go up and down your knee on the incision after this, it’s healed.

Of course, you don’t want to do this on an incision that’s still trying to close, it’s still scabbed over, this needs to be on an incision that’s completely scarred over and you’re confident that you won’t bleed or open up in any way.

Once you’re confident you can do that, then you need to be moving the skin around just like this, frequently. I mean, for most people, it needs to be every 30 minutes, just a little bit like 30 seconds to 60 seconds, every half hour to make sure that that skin freezes up. And as you’re doing exercises your move bending your knee and straightening out your knee, you should find that the mobility of your skin and your knee overall should improve over time.

And you should find that swelling decreases and overall pain should decrease as well. This is just one part of many things that need to happen in order to heal properly from a knee replacement surgery.

On this channel here I’ve got tons of videos to help people recovering from a knee replacement, especially for those that are having chronic pain after having had a knee replacement like three year or more out from having a knee replacement, and they’re still running into issues.

If you need help in that area go down into the description of this video and you’ll find a playlist called knee replacement help. There’s tons of videos there to help you out with all the different aspects of helping a knee replacement recover from chronic knee pain. I’ve also got a program called the failed knee replacement recovery program that goes into much more detail than what we offer here on our YouTube channel.

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