How To Test & Heal A Torn ACL Without Surgery

Have you suffered from a torn ACL? Or do you think that you might have a torn ACL? Most people know they have a torn ACL, only after they’ve seen a doctor and had an MRI. But did you know that MRI readings of ACL tears have been shown in medical research to be wrong up to over 40% of the time. This means that surgeons are recommending ACL surgery over 40% of the time, incorrectly.

More on this later. But in this video, today, I’m going to explain to you three things that you need to look for in your knee so that you can determine if you’ve got an ACL injury, and also explain the different types of ACL tears, the different types of grades, there’s the column grades, and then what to begin to do so that you can begin to fix this ACL injury on your own naturally so that you can avoid having surgery.

I’m Dr. David Middaugh, and I’m a specialist physical therapist and owner of El Paso manual physical therapy. This channel is focused on making videos to help you stay healthy, active, and mobile. while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and medications. Be sure to hit subscribe and turn on your notifications so that you don’t miss any helpful tips that we put out each week.

Now let me tell you three things that you can do to find if your ACL is hurt, and then begin to find out how bad it is for you. Number one, clicking and popping is a very common sign of a torn or sprained ACL. Now, the way this works is it’s frequent. It’s not just like you get one big pop or clunk, although that might happen.

But if you everybody’s nice pop, and click at times, and it’s done, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have an ACL tear an ACL injury, what you’re looking for is, especially if you’re off weighted, like you don’t have your full weight to your leg, like right now I’m going to lean more on my left leg, but I’m bending and straightening my right knee, if you can do that kind of emotion, or if you’re sitting down and you move your leg round, and you feel like there’s a clunk in there that wasn’t there, you know, before you injured it, or before it started to get worse.

That’s a sign that you have a torn or an injured ACL. And just to show you how this works. Let me get my knee joint here. The ACL ligament is called the anterior cruciate ligament. It’s a big ligament that connects the thigh bone. This is the thigh bone to the shin bone. And the angle of it is kind of like this, it goes inward.

This is the inside of the knee and the outside of the knee. And it’s very important at making sure that the bones are connected best. So if you’ve got an injury to that, and you go to bend your knee, it just the connections kind of loose in the joint clunks within itself with simple, easy motions, it tends to actually click and pop less.

If you’re doing more active stuff, it tends to pop and click more when you’re just sitting around moving your leg or you know, some people will kick their bone, or they’ll shift positions to cross your legs or shift their weight over. And then they get an uncomfortable clicker pop. That’s what you’re looking for.

That’s more of the typical signs of but clicking and popping sounds that then you can generate, and it’s not always painful, it can be completely pain free in some situations. Sometimes it is painful, as well as depends on how severe the ACL tear is. And if there’s anything else involved, like a meniscus tear that can often happen along with an ACL tear.

The second sign that you’re looking for is increased swelling with activity. So if you’ve got your ACL injury for a while you suspect it it’s been there for several weeks or months. Some people have even dealt with it for years before they decide to do something about it. If you’re up on your feet more so you’re doing chores around the house, or you go to exercise or you just have a day where you’re on your feet more out doing errands or something.

If you notice that your knee swells more with more activity that you do, and you’ve also got that clicking and popping that I’m talking about. That’s a high sign a combination of those two sides, there’s a high chance that you’ve got an ACL injury and the connection between the two bones here the thigh bone and the shin bone, the femur and the tibia are loose and it’s starting to irritate the tissues inside often the meniscus gets irritated. And that’s why you can get a meniscus tear in addition to an ACL tear.

If that looseness doesn’t get resolved, then you start to get swelling, you can have increased fluid in the joint. Sometimes doctors want to go and take out the fluid that fluids there for a reason. It’s your knee joint responding to the loss of stability. And so the fluid increase, the fluid increases inside so that you can develop a cushion on the knee. Sometimes it can even turn into a baker cyst, which, where there’s like a puffiness on the back of the knee.

They call it a bigger system. It really is just the knee joint capsule and ligaments in the back of the knee that have stretched out because of the excess fluid that’s building up inside. So that the knees in the nice effort to protect itself.

And the third sign. This one’s a test and I got to warn you before I show this to you it very well might hurt your knee, it might make you worse. So be very cautious in proceeding and doing this. In fact, just watch it first. And if you know that this is going to hurt, you don’t even try it.

Now, if you are not that bad, you feel like you can bend and straighten out your knee decently well, then you can attempt this. And as soon as you start to feel any increased pain, increased tightness is also another sign that I want you to back off and just assume that this test is showing you that you’ve got a torn ACL or an ACL problem.

So please do not be aggressive, do not force yourself to this test. It’s not designed for you to just crank on your knee and take it at all it’s got, you’re going to really tear it and mess it up. So that being said, I’m going to try to be very safe during this test, what you need to do is find a place that you can stand and hold on to something stable like a wall or a kitchen counter or something a desks have a sturdy chair, not a computer chair that swivels or has wheels on it can move around, find a piece of furniture or a wall that’s very stable.

You’re going to hold on to that I’ll show you here in a second when my feet are doing, you can hold on to that with your hands. And then you’re going to turn your feet inwards as far as it’ll go. And then you’re going to squat with your knees inwards. And what I want you to do before you even try this is lean over to your good leg, your leg that isn’t hurt the one that that seems okay. And try to put more body weight on that side, maybe like 75% and then 25% on the knee that does bother you.

And as you’ve been with your knees inward, if you start to slow, if you start to feel increased tightness, increase pain, do not go all the way down, you might just even unlock your knees a little bit and already feel it back up. And that’s a good sign that you’ve got an ACL injury, you don’t need to go any further. So let me show you what this looks like on my legs. Alright, so for the purposes of this video, I don’t have something to hold on to. But luckily, I don’t have any knee injuries.

So I’m going to turn my feet all the way in just like so. And they’re going to squat down. If you already start to get pain or tightness in the knee that bothers you, you’re done. Test is over. If you also have the clicking and popping in the swelling, like I talked about, do not proceed, you can have pretty good confidence you have an ACL injury. But if you are not that bad, and you want to take a little bit further, of course hold on to something steady, and you can go down as much as comfortable and then come back up out of it.

Now when do this test more than two or three times, just because you can aggravate an ACL that’s already injured and make it worse if you know that their stiffness and tightness. If you’ve got the clicking and popping, if you got the swelling that comes on the more you’re on your feet, then you can be pretty certain that you have an ACL injury.

Which brings us to the next point, let’s talk about the different types of ACL injuries. There are three grades, grade one means that it’s a mild sprain spring meaning the ligament itself got a little over stretched. And it’s not torn necessarily maybe there’s tiny micro tears, but it has a good chance at healing and, and shortening backup to its usual length so that the joint is tight the way it’s supposed to be. And you’re not loose and the bones aren’t wobbling on each other. Great too, is where it got overstretch, and there’s some tearing happening.

It’s a partial tear, that has an excellent chance of healing, you’ve got to make sure that you take care of the stability so that you’re not all wobbly in your knee. And which might mean strengthening. I’ll talk about some other stuff that you can do as well. But you have an excellent chance at healing if you’ve got that kind of tear.

And by the way, these grades are usually given to you after you’ve had an MRI and the doctor is taking a look at you though, they’ll tell you the grade or on the MRI report itself. If you end up having an MRI, it will likely say on there about your ACL as you get a grade one, two, or three or there’s other options too, like an avulsion is where the bone is ripped off. The ACL actually didn’t tear the bone broke, where the ACL attaches. That’s a bad situation.

Obviously, you want to probably talk to your doctor if that’s going on. And you’ll know what your knee will not be normal at all, not anywhere near normal. But back to what I was saying. grade three means there’s a complete tear the ends of the of the ACL are not connected anymore.

Now all this is usually diagnosed through an MRI, which is not the gold standard at looking into a knee but it’s the best thing that we can do without actually opening your knee up because that is the gold standard surgical observation of the ACL to determine if it’s torn or not is the gold standard. But of course, that’s invasive.

That means you have to get cut open, and you have to look at your knee usually within arthroscope meaning that you know they make little holes or not like busting your knee open like a book. But either way, you don’t want to have an exploratory surgery just to determine if your ACL is torn.

If a surgeon is going to go in to look at your ACL chances are they’re going they’re planning on doing a repair and if there’s any sort of laxity in Sort of partial tear, it’s right for them, it’s you know, they’re going to make the best judgment call.

They’re the surgeons, of course, to actually tear your ACL if it’s not already torn, and surgically repair it to further tighten it down. But I would ask the question that was that the smart thing to do to begin with to put yourself in the situation, where you’re under the knife and having an ACL reconstruction that you possibly could have avoided?

Had you done the right things that I’m going to talk to you about? As we go on in this video, then remember what I said at the beginning. There’s research out there that shows that ACL tears can be misread on an MRI over 40% of the time. Now, there’s some research studies that show as low as a 3% error, but there’s some that show over 40% error, we don’t have 100% knowledge of where exactly the ranges, but that’s high enough to possibly get away with not having the surgery done.

And what you need to know is, if you think about yourself functionally, like what are you doing right now is your knees so swollen, that you can bend it or straighten it, or you can put weight on it, you just you’ve been like that for a while. If you’re bad, if you have not gotten any better over the past few weeks, then you might consider having a surgery.

There’s really just two situations where you should have surgery in my humble expert opinion. And you’ve got to take this with a grain of salt, you’ve got to think about your current situation that you’re in what you plan to do in the future, there’s a lot to factor in, and you just have to think about it and sit down and, and not just take every surgeon’s word as gospel and think, well, that’s what I got to do the surgeon, you can probably get better in many situations if you’ve got an injured ACL, even if it’s completely torn.

One reason when you should have an ACL tear is if you’re a professional athlete, meaning you’re getting paid to do a sport or some sport related activity, and your job depends on your knee being stable, then I would highly consider having an ACL surgery.

If I was a professional football player, basketball player, whatever sport athlete and I was making some decent money doing that I would highly consider having an ACL reconstruction for the peace of mind that I’m not going to retire real soon, with my knowledge and know how to rehab it and make sure that it’s not going to happen again. But ACL tears happen accidentally sometimes.

The second situation where I would recommend an ACL surgery is if you have truly done everything that you can to heal it naturally to prevent it from getting any worse and you’re just not getting anywhere you feel like it’s plateaued or it’s even getting worse. And that’s a situation where you probably should consider having an ACL reconstruction.

Now, if it’s just been a few weeks since you first hurt your ACL, like if you had an incident where somebody fell into your leg or you stumbled and fell, and especially if you heard a pop, that’s usually a sign that you have a complete tear. Not always though, it could be the joint popping or other structures popping.

But if you had the classic ACL tear, the massive one where it pops, it swells, you’re on crutches for a while the MRI shows that you have a tear, then it you there’s things that you can do to heal unnaturally. But if it’s just not getting better, you tried it for you tried rehabbing it for months, I would say give it some time, give it some months, because you can have an ACL reconstruction years after you don’t have to have it right away.

So like there’s an important window of time. And if you don’t have your surgery within that timeframe, you miss out on your window to ever heal properly, it is good to get that swelling down because that’s all you need to move better. Allow the ligament to heal if there’s a chance of it healing in any other tissues inside your knee like cartilage and meniscus tendons, muscles, all the other stuff that around the area to heal and give you a chance at rehabbing your knee rehabilitating your knee naturally, so that you never have to have a surgery and deal with some of the side effects like an infection.

Some people have excessive scar tissue that doesn’t let their knee joint move, right. And then there’s some people that regret having the surgery because they never get their full range of motion back. And they just don’t feel the same in their knee as it was before. And when a lot of people don’t know because surgeons aren’t always the most accurate at telling them is after you have an ACL reconstruction, a lot of surgeons say oh yeah, it’ll be back to walking and up and running, doing you’ll be fine within a few months.

And the reality is it takes a year, sometimes longer. It’s rare that somebody is back to sport in less than a year. Occasionally you hear about some freak, professional athlete that did it in nine months, but they’re really the exception. Most people take over 12 months to get back to feeling mostly normal. You’ve got to get all the motion after your knee bend after the you’ve got to get all your motion back after the surgery.

You got to get your strength back. It’s a process. You’re going to be on crutches for a while. You’d be worried a big giant uncomfortable brace for a while as well. And you’re going to lose touch A muscle on that leg, there’s just all these side effects. If you need it, you need it. But if you can get away without it, you might actually recover quicker than if you have the surgery and do all the recovery after the surgery.

So let me tell you what you should be doing. If you’re going to heal this thing, naturally, I’ve got a knee brace here. And something like this is critically important for you to be in. If you’ve had an ACL injury, if you did those three tests that we looked at, if you got the clock, the clicking and popping, you’ve got the swelling up on your feet too long, you did that inward squat and your knee hurts, or it feels a little worse after doing that, then this is going to help you out tremendously.

Now this is the Shock Doctor Knee Brace, it’s got these brackets, these hinges on the inside and these hinges right here, the metal brackets on the side, you need something significant, you won’t get by very well, if you just have a basic neoprene sleeve brace, it doesn’t have any sort of hinges on the side, the hinges are critically important because think about it, your knee just lost the best source of stability from a ligament inside of it. It’s all loose.

That’s why you’re swelling and clicking and popping. That’s why you can’t squat normally, because it just isn’t stable. So get that knee brace on, so that those metal brackets force it to move in a way that isn’t going to further stretch out your ACL and make the problem worse.

These knee braces are not that expensive at all. They range anywhere from 50 to 100 bucks. And basically, you know, I recommend this one to my clients because it lasts about what you need to heal it most of the time. These lasts anywhere from six to 12 months, depending on how active you are, how much you use them.

You know what environment you’re in and how sweaty you get all those different things. And even if you have to buy a second one, it’s not that bad because you were out the first one. But you can spend more money and get a more expensive brace if you need to. Generally what you’re paying for with these braces is better quality materials.

But the baseline that you need is some sort of metal brackets or they sell hard plastic to that works with a hinge so that your knee motion is very controlled as you’re going through. Now you’ve got to wear this, you can wear it under your clothes or over your clothes. Depending on you know how tight Your clothes are.

Hopefully it’s wintertime wherever you’re at, or it’s not too hot, because these things get sweaty. And you’ve just got to deal with that. And they slide down your leg. But that’s normal there. I’ve never seen a brace even the high-end braces that just stay put and never slide down your leg. So you’ve just got to deal with the issues with wearing the brace.

The benefits of it are far outweigh the downside to using the brace clients that have used these of course when I see them day to day as they’re coming in for the treatments, they tell, they talked to me about how the brace things at the end of the day, they’ve got to slide the metal brackets out and throw to the washing machine or they handle wash it like almost every day, it gets so stinky. You know, they just got to deal with issues surrounding the brace.

But they’re also telling me my nice little bit better. It’s clicking and popping less I didn’t swell over the past week, I feel more confident in my knee I feel like I I went up and down the stairs. And I didn’t have to hold on to the rail so much. And gradually over time. Their ACL is getting healthier, happier, and they’re on their way to rehabbing their ACL problem without ever having a surgery. Even grade threes.

We’ve seen people that have had completely torn ACL as shown by a an MRI, obviously, they’ve come to us and I’ll do my tests that healthcare professionals do to the patience to check their ACLs and that seems to people with some what I thought were completely torn ACLs do this where the brace and there’s exercises that we have them run through which is secondary, really this is the main thing.

They have gotten better. They’ve gotten out of crutches, they’ve gotten back to walking normally being on their feet back to even exercise. I’m talking like running and weightlifting. And it’s even necessary once they’re healthy enough to do that. So that they can make their ACL stronger so doesn’t tear or get stretched out again.

So I can’t stress enough how important it is. If you’ve got an ACL injury or an ACL tear and you’re looking to fix it without surgery, get in one of these braces as soon as possible. I’ve linked in the description below a link to this brace on Amazon. But like I said they range anywhere from 50 to $100.

And one thing to note about the shock doctor brand, this is probably an older model than what’s out now this is the 872 there’s newer versions of this out there and they all they generally do a good job of updating their braces. But what I found on the sizing chart is you should if you look on Amazon at the sizing chart or on their website, go up a size from what the sizing chart would tell you to get.

That’s I’ve consistently found that if the sizing chart tells you to get a large get an extra-large or if it’s an extra-large get an x x large. I’ve never seen anyone fit into Smaller medium is probably more for children, the small and the medium. But most people need at least a large if not an extra large or a double or triple extra-large. That’s pretty common. And then you know the straps that go around, there’s instructions on how to put this on. And just make sure that your kneecap is sitting in this hole.

That’s how you can judge that this the knee brace is on your leg appropriately. And you know, I had an injury A while back, I use one of these braces myself, it took me like 10 months to use the brace and me personally, I had a ligament injury wasn’t my ACL it was it was a different ligament in my knee and my right knee from running.

They told me to stay in the brace for two months, this is a big deal you got you got to listen to this thoroughly. Because if you’re looking at truly fixing your ACL problem naturally without surgery, you might need to go beyond what the recommendations make. I was told two months is necessary. And if it doesn’t work, if you don’t get the stability, you need to be able to heal enough from your ligament injury, then you should consider getting surgery at that point.

Well, after two months of wearing the knee brace consistently and I’m talking so you should wear By the way, as soon as I woke up in the morning, I take it off to sleep. But as soon as I woke up in the morning, this knee brace was on me, I wouldn’t take more than two steps to reach for my knee brace and I get it on before I went to the bathroom to cover other things in the morning. You know, I didn’t shower with it, obviously. But I had this on pretty much anytime I was on my feet inside the house outside the house.

Gradually as I got better, I began to exercise a bit as well. But I wore this knee brace pretty consistently, I’d say about 97% of the time whenever I had my ligament injury. And that’s what I recommend that you do as well, I would just slip it off to relax or to sleep at night or obviously to take a shower. Now going beyond the recommendation. After two months of worrying this knee brace, I felt 30% better.

I still felt my knee injury I was still getting some swelling myself I had a poster lateral corner tears, but I had so you can look that up. It’s a treatment very similar to as if you had an ACL injury. But after two months, I said well, why not go a third or fourth month, I’m willing to go as long as I need to, if this is still making me better, why not I don’t want surgery.

So I went a third month and a fourth month and I would just check myself after every month and I found that it was a little better. And it was a little better. And I was still walking around I have kids I was taking care of my kids. I was working on physical therapists I’m on my feet quite a bit as being active, not as active as I was when I was exercising, of course but I’m out doing stuff outside the house and inside the house.

And it took me 10 months total before I got to the point where I said I don’t need this anymore; I can do just fine without. And the last few months, I was weaning myself off, I wasn’t in it as much I was, I was having a day in and day out of it. And I went two days without it and so forth. I just kept weaning myself off the brace gradually, as I felt comfortable in my knee.

If my knee did not feel comfortable, I felt like I was getting any sort of swelling, any sort of issues in my knee, then I was back in the brace. Now, you might be looking for exercises on fixing an ACL injury and there’s tons there’s endless amounts of exercises.

If you’re looking for more tests on checking an ACL injury, especially the ones that like doctors do, or knee specialists do, there’s tons of tests out there. But if you’ve got these signs that I told you about that the clicking and popping the swelling in the knee, the inward squat is painful, you probably have an ACL tear and getting in one of these is super affordable, relatively easy to do, it doesn’t hold you in your life, it can make a huge difference it might save you from surgery.

So you know paying 100 bucks for one of these are much better than paying 1000s and 1000s. Or even if you have insurance and they cover your surgery stuff to pay a deductible likely, but not to mention all the rehab that you have to go through after a an ACL reconstruction. It’s pretty gruesome. If you ever talk to anybody that has had one or or if you look up videos on somebody that’s going through it is pretty gruesome.

This is a much easier, much affordable, just a much better option than if you have to have an ACL reconstruction surgery. So that is how you can heal from an ACL injury. Naturally you got to get in a brace like this. Now, like I said, I had this link in the description below. I don’t care if you get this one get just get something with hinges and some stiff struts.

Some stiff supports on the side could be metal, it could be plastic, you decide what’s best for you what’s best for your pocketbook, what fits best on your body as well and get in a brace. I’ve got one more thing for you that I want to share about fixing your knee naturally. Now, let’s just say you use a knee brace and you’re feeling better and better. Or maybe you’re not that bad right now and need braces good from time to time but you’re actually improving quite a bit.

Then what needs to happen next so that you can heal naturally without surgery is you’ve got to get into some aggressive strengthening. And what I’ve got to ask you is do you have very big quads Do you have dominant quad muscles; I’m talking about the muscles on the front of the thigh. If you have a history of exercising you feel like you always feel your quads burning or the tired of the get sore often, especially if you do jump sports or weightlifting, like squats, deadlifts, those kinds of things.

And we have to ask you is do your finger glutes get sore, if you don’t feel your butt muscles get sore, then that is likely what set you up to have your ACL injury and you’ve got to begin strengthening your glutes to get better control at the knee joint so that you can protect your ACL from future injury. I know that was kind of a lot of hoops to jump through. But trust me, we help people with this problem all the time. And what it almost always comes back to is proper glute strength and good movement using the glutes when it comes to leg activities like running, jumping squats, any kind of leg, exercise or activity.

If you’re looking for more guidance on this, we go into great detail about it in our 28 Day Knee Health And Wellness Boost Program. You can find the link about it in the description below. But just to give you the the gist of it. It’s a 28 day 100% online program that you can do at your pace, where it’s me teaching you details about how to exercise your legs to improve your knee health and boost its wellness. So check that out when you get a chance.

Guys, thanks so much for watching. If you thought this video was helpful, give it a like. And one more thing. If you also have a meniscus injury and you want to learn about how to heal a meniscus tear and how to check for it. Check out our video about how to test and heal a meniscus problem without surgery. Have a wonderful day.