Is Your Painful Inner Knee Problem Really An MCL Tear

Do you have pain on the inside of your knee and you think that you might have torn a ligament here, specifically the mcl ligament, or the medial collateral ligament is ligament, it’s on the inside of your knee and that one often gets stretched out. sprain is another name for that, or even torn in some cases.

And the good news about this ligament is it can heal naturally usually does not require surgery, you just got to make sure that you do the right treatment, which I’ll talk about in a separate video. But what you need to know right now is Do you even have an MCL tear? Or could it be something else?

Because there’s lots of reasons that you can have pain on the inside of the knee? You’ll want to watch this video to the answer that you can fully understand whether or not you’ve got an MTL tear. And if you don’t have an MTL tear, I’ve linked in the description below another video that talks about a bunch of other reasons why you might have pain on the inside of the knee, and ways to determine what the cause of your inner knee pain is.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist and El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgery injections and pain medications. Please subscribe so you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos that we post every single week.

So let’s cover the symptoms and the diagnosis tests for an MCI injury. And you’ll be able to do this on your own. Now the symptoms are a big deal, because if you’ve if you’ve got the symptoms associated with this, and part of that is the history of what happened to you, then that’s a big determining factor in the diagnosis.

For the symptoms. Usually there’s an accident of some sort, not always, but oftentimes there is and the accident happens in such a way where someone falls into the outside of your leg or you get shoved or your knee collapses inward somehow, through a series of events.

Usually the people are, are playing sports, they’re active somehow people that have this injury, the classic mcl injury is soccer, football, basketball, those, those sports people fall into the side of the leg, and it just over stretches the inside of the of the knee right here. And that that’s where the MCI lives right here.

It connects the shin bone to the thigh bone. And so when it just gets overstretched, that’s what causes the sprain or the injury to the knee. In sports and sports world, they often call this a sprain knee. There’s a bunch of ligaments. If you injure any of those ligaments, we’ll call it a sprained knee.

But specifically the mcl is on the inside of the knee. This usually affects people in their teenage years, 20s and 30s. And that’s because they tend to be a little bit more active people that are older than that are usually in their careers and working more and just aren’t as active. But it does happen in active individuals that are older than 40 5060 years old.

Of course, the big symptom is inner knee pain. So if you got pain or right on the inside of the knee, and it doesn’t really bother you anywhere else, like on the front on the outside of the back of the knee, then that’s a specific sign that you probably have an NCL tear. And one of the other big determining factors here as far as symptoms go is clicking or popping if you have notable clicking or popping that started after the knee pain started.

And especially if you had an accident and you began to notice the clicking or popping, then there’s a chance that that ligament is so overstretched that it’s no longer providing stability to the joint because what that ligament does show you the skeleton here, along with other ligaments in the knee, that ligament connects from about right here to about right here and helps to keep the inside of the knee stable.

So if you’ve got that part of the knee loose, this joint has a bit more flexibility than it should and when you go to step or walk or run or do things, the joint moves around a little extra can cause a repeatable click.

Now if it pops or clicks, one slight, you know joints pop in your neck or your back just once and you can’t reproduce it, you can’t do it again, then that wouldn’t be too concerned. That might increase anyway, if you’ve got this MCI injury, but I wouldn’t worry about it because virtually any injury to the knee can cause the stiffness in the knee that causes it to pop and feel like it got looser all of a sudden, what I’m talking about is if you’re walking and every fifth step you notice like a little click or shift or a pop, and that’s consistent.

Or another way that you can get is if you bend and straighten your knee. And every so often on a consistent basis, you feel a click and they do it again and click pop or a shift even can happen where it feels like something moved inside your knee. That is a big determining factor in deciding if you have an MC l tear or a partial tear as well because it’s possible to not completely rip the tendon or started the ligament, but to partially rip the ligaments, which still decreases the stability in the joint from the ligament.

So now let’s talk about the diagnosis of an MTL tear, there’s two things that you’re going to look at. Now, first off, I need you to find the ligament on yourself. So you got to get good at a little bit of poking around. It is directly on the innermost part of your knee, and it runs up and down along your knee joint from the end of the thigh bone here to the top of the shin bone.

So you have to find your joint line out the knees are pretty big joint. But you know, with all your tissues and everything, it’s kind of hard to determine exactly where the joint line is. But watch this knee joint here. When I bend and straighten the knee, you can see how the shin bone moves quite a bit over the end of the thigh bone, where you’re going to feel for that motion in your knee.

Because once you can feel the emotion, then you know exactly where the joint line is. And you can go up a bit from there and down a bit from there to determine where your MCL is yet Skelton out of the way. So all you’re going to do here is wrap your hands around your knee to just to find exactly where the pain is at. And you don’t have to interlock your fingers. I’m just doing this right here.

It’s okay real like this. There isn’t a specific way. Once you got your knee, once you’re holding on to your knee, just move it around. And I can feel the shin bone moving up over my thigh bone about right there. My kneecaps right here, Shin bones right there. So I found the joint line.

Now I’m going to go inwards, on my joint line, and on the innermost part before it starts going back into your knee, that’s where your MC L is. So if you just poke it right along the joint line, and it hurts, okay by be your MC L. But it could be your meniscus, it could be other things, there’s several things that cause inner knee pain, go to the description to find the link to the video that talks about other things that could be causing your inner knee pain.

But if you go down just about an inch or so, a couple centimeters and up a couple centimeters or an inch, and if it’s tender in those areas is well, not just one spot at the joint line but a little below and a little above, then likely you’ve got an injured MTL ligament. Now there’s one more test that you got to do. And this one’s a bit more challenging to do on your own.

But you should be able to do it with my instruction here. You’re going to stress the NCL here, this is what doctors will do in the clinic, this is what a physical therapist might do. It might hurt just a bit you can moderate, you can control the pressure here to determine you know how much you want to give. And you got to test both sides to be able to determine a comparison to see if it’s the same as the other side.

Or if there’s a difference on your injured side. Now this test, if you can do it successfully is very revealing. And it’ll be pretty certain if you got all the other signs and symptoms that I’ve talked about. And then this test is positive or in other words, it’s it’s your stress test is showing that your MCA is loose, then you’re you’ve got pretty good certainty that your MCA is involved here, which is good, because now you can determine what to do next.

You know what, what next steps to take. So what you’re going to do is, is put your foot up on a chair, your knees going to be kind of bent, and then you got to drop your leg inwards, like so you might be able to get away with doing this on the floor, you just got to put your leg in a slightly bent position and drop your whole leg and words, then carefully going to take a couple hands over your knee and start to apply some pressure so that you’re bending your knee inwards this way.

But really, you’re going to be pushing down because your legs rotated in. And you’re just going to lean into it gradually. And if you feel any pain or discomfort, that’s it just stop right there. You’re also noting how far your knee moves that way. So everybody’s nice should give just a bit. But if if you kind of just watch how much it gives and compare this to the other side.

Put your leg in the same inwards position, hand over hand. And if you’re like, oh, wow, this one doesn’t hurt as bad as my other one. And it doesn’t it’s stiffer, which is good. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. This one’s kind of loose. When I compare and it hurts a bit. That’s a clear sign that you’ve got an MCs injury might be a partial tear.

Complete tears usually swell up quite a bit. And you kind of know when you got it. But if you have a partial tear and you’re not sure you got that clicking, you had a sports accident, sometimes it just happens without an accident. It could be other factors, the way that you’re moving the way that you’re training, muscle imbalances and the like.

But you can now determine if you’ve got an MC l tear using these tests. Now if you do have an MC altar, you’ve done all these tests and you determine that it’s you likely have an ACL tear. You need to brace your knee. That’s one of the big treatments for this. bracing your knee using a brace Just like this one really helps to provide stability to that to the knee joints so that it’s not hurting as much, you’re not overstretching the ligament, but it protects the ligaments so that it can heal.

Ligaments should heal within a few weeks to most a couple of months if you’re allowing it to space and time the support to heal. Once you heal, you should be able to get back to normal activities and you got to look at just preventing the injury from happening again. So I like this brace alive. I’ll put a link to a brace like this in the description below. You need to get one that has some stiff brackets on either side and ideally hinges. This one has some hinges inside.

So a simple brace sleeve without hinges typically doesn’t do enough doesn’t give you enough support. The ones with the brackets on the sides are much better for an MCs injury, you need to get that the the hinge brace, it just makes a world of a difference and saves you a bunch of time and other problems from developing like a meniscus tear or an ACL tear which is even worse.

You just need to protect that ligament and give it some time to heal. And this brace does a fantastic job at that. And don’t forget, if you found that you don’t have an MC Altair, go to the description and find the video there that talks about other reasons you could have internet pain and give us a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to our channel. Thanks so much guys. Have a great day.