Most Common Type Of Nerve Injury After Knee Replacement Surgery

What is the most commonly injured nerve after having a knee replacement? I’m going to show you here, this black line represents the incision that the surgeon made in order to move your kneecap over and get to the ends of the bones where they did the replacements. And this purplish line right here represents the pathway of a nerve called the saphenous nerve.

When they do this cut right here, they have to cut a branch off the nerve that goes this way across the bottom of the kneecap. And that’s called the infrapatellar branch of the saphenous nerve. Now, the hope is that after they cut that nerve, that it’s going to reattach itself, and that you’ll be normal again.

But the reality is that most people have this numbness sensation on the other side of the incision, or that infrapatellar nerve goes. And in some people, they actually have chronic pain that develops as a result of that nerve being severed.

Hopefully, you’re one of the lucky ones that just has some numbness and you’re not really dealing with any major issues, maybe some lingering discomfort from time to time, but nothing that sets you back. But if you’re one of those that is having some pretty consistent, uncomfortable pain, or just a feeling of discomfort in the area.

Now there’s a couple things that you need to do to start to get that nerve healthy again, now before I show you, it’s important that you understand that there’s a possibility that you may never be 100% again. You may always have some lingering nerve issue, the hope that you can have is that you can improve it so that it’s not that bad.

And you can manage with your knee replacement just fine, you can go back to doing the things that you love, without worrying that it’s going to get worse. So usually over the incision site, that’s where a lot of scar tissue develops.

And right where that nerve intersects the incision site, you have got to make sure that you free up the skin in the area that you can see how I’m moving my skin here and not trying to move everything under it. I’m lightly pressing down on my fingers, and you’re just using your fingertips usually from your index and middle fingers to just gently move the skin you’re not pressing hard and moving it aggressively.

You’re just gently moving the skin and can go away from your knee towards your knee, you can go side to side, you can do circles, it really doesn’t matter the direction that you move, I would just try to get every direction you possibly can as you’re moving the knee joint here or moving the skin over the knee joint.

But you need to make sure that it moves and you can see the skin here on my knee moves well. I haven’t had surgery obviously. But if you’ve had surgery, it may feel like there’s spots that don’t budge, it’s okay to move right over the incision site as long as it’s closed up, and it’s healed already.

There’s no openings in the incision, it’s scarred over, you can move the scar and just get it to free up. Doing this little easy motion on a very frequent basis. I’m talking like every 30 minutes every 60 minutes just to move the skin and begin to unstick the skin from the surfaces below from the tissues below, one of those being the nerve, that can begin to allow the nerve to heal properly and function properly so that you can address that nerve injury that happens from the knee replacement.

If you’re looking for more help with a knee replacement, check out the playlist in the description below here called Failed Knee Replacement Help and I’ve also got a program called the Failed Knee Replacement Recovery Program. There’s a link for that in the description below as well. Thanks so much for watching this video.

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