Top 4 Causes Of Knee Meniscus Tears

Have you been told that your meniscus tear can’t heal? If you’re dealing with knee pain and you think that it might be a meniscus problem, then you’re going to learn a lot from this video today. And from what you’ll learn, you’ll get clarity about your specific knee problems so that you can make the best decision about your knee problem moving forward.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist that will pass on manual physical therapy. Can a meniscus tear heal? Let me answer that. Yes, a resounding yes, a meniscus tear can heal. And we see it happen all the time here in the clinic with our patients. And we do it naturally, without surgery through our specialist treatment.

Some patients have had a meniscus injury in the past that they had surgery for. And for some, it’s their first meniscus injury. They’ve never had surgery. We help them either way. So why does so many doctors, surgeons, other health care providers, even physical therapists tell their patients that if they’ve got a meniscus tear that they have to go get surgery because it won’t heal? Let me answer this for you.

Often healthcare professionals were told in school that the meniscus doesn’t heal. And this is old science. This is old medical knowledge from the 90s and 80s. And before and because these health care professionals haven’t been updated on the most current research, they’re still telling their patients to go get surgery as soon as they see that there’s a meniscus tear, and they don’t have an idea that it can heal on its own.

With the right kind of treatment naturally. The fact is that most of the medical research for meniscus injuries is focused on doing surgery on the meniscus. Often it’s called the meniscectomy. So we really only have research on how people with meniscectomy knees do whether or not they get better. But the truth is that the medical profession as a whole just doesn’t have much research on how the meniscus can heal naturally without surgery.

But just because we haven’t studied it and don’t have any research on it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t heal more research in recent years has shown that people that get surgery do about the same as people that don’t get surgery, who go through conservative treatment, as a research says, You can Google this yourself. So why even have a surgery and what are the people that aren’t getting surgery doing to get better for the meniscus.

I’ll tell you about treatment options in just a second. But first, let me tell you about the signs and symptoms of meniscus tears so that you can be sure that it’s what you have going on in your knee problem, there’s four main signs that you have to look for the first sign is pain in the knee joint, it’s typically right where the knee bends it might be on the front might be on the back, oftentimes, it’s on the inside of the knee more so it can also be on the outside of the knee.

But it’s usually pain right in the in the center of the knee joint where it bends, and how that differs from other knee problems. Things like cartilage damage, like behind the kneecap, that pain will be more so on the front of the knee pretty focused, whereas meniscus pain tends to be right on the sides of the knee where it bends, sometimes a bit more on the front, sometimes a bit more on the back.

The second most common sign and symptom of a meniscus tear is clicking or popping inside the knee joint when it’s bent at a certain position. If you’re able to bend and straighten out your knee and get a reproducible popper, click like every time you straighten it out and go back to bend it at about the same point, it clicks, clicks, clicks or pops, pops pops, it may hurt when it happens, it may not.

But if you can have a reproducible click or pop, that’s a common sign of a meniscus tear. A third sign symptom of meniscus tears is catching or locking of the knee. Now this is a more severe version of the clicking and popping. And the way this looks is all of a sudden, the knee joint will lock at a certain position and it can’t straighten out and it can’t bend it stays stuck.

Oftentimes it’s painful. It’s always debilitating because the person can’t lock or move their knees stuck. They can’t bend it to sit down straight and they can’t walk on it because they won’t straighten it out. And it takes a minute, sometimes several minutes to find out how to move it to loosen it up and get it to bend and straighten out normally again.

Oftentimes, there’s pain afterwards for a while, maybe a few hours. Sometimes even days afterwards, he gets flared up. And the reason why we think this happens is because a flap of the tear gets caught within the joint as it’s bending and straightening, and it just blocks up the knee joint. The fourth sign of meniscus tear is swelling.

This one might be a little trickier, but if you pay attention, you can probably figure it out in your knee. If you’ve had a locking event where the knee caught and it got stuck or locked in that same position like I was talking about just a moment ago. There’s usually associated swelling after that.

The other time that the knee will swell is if the person’s on their feet for quite a bit if they’re standing around walking and they’re using their legs quite a bit. The weight of the body on the meniscus because it is a weight supporting structure inside the knee joint.

It’s a chunk of cartilage that helps to support the weight of the body, it gets aggravated, and it can swell if you’ve been on your feet too long. And if that swelling isn’t allowed to go away and calm down, it can stay swollen for a long time if you keep getting on your feet or keep doing some aggravating thing to your knee.

Now, let me tell you about the treatment options out there. Of course, people typically go to their doctor first, which doctors are going to recommend medications, injections, and likely surgery, in some cases will recommend physical therapy as well. If you take medications for this organ injection, that’s medication as well, it’s just a band aid solution, it’s really just masking the pain.

But it’s not fixing the root problem that got the tear in the first place. If you end up getting a surgery for this, they’ll typically do something called a meniscectomy. They make little holes in the sides of your knee, and they’ll go in with little tubes, and they’ll cut off the chunk of the meniscus that is torn and might be getting caught inside the joints. And that’s supposed to allow your meniscus to work normally afterwards.

The problem with the surgery is that there’s usually some root problem that hasn’t been addressed, that is going to set up that person to get another tear to reactivate the knee in some other way after the surgery. Now, let me back up a minute and say that in some cases, surgery is a good thing, it might be the best thing for the individual to have the surgery.

But if you’re if you’re one of those if you’re going to go get the surgery because you are truly debilitated you can’t bend or straighten out your knee. It’s a constant multiple times a day thing that this meniscus tear is bothering you. Yes, surgery might be the best thing for you. But you still have to ask yourself the question and begin to address the problem of how did you get this tear in the first place.

Because if you never had a traumatic injury, if you never were never in a car accident, you’re never you never had a sports injury, you never fell off a bike or motorcycle and hurt your knee pretty bad. This problem just started without any sort of incident like that, then there’s something about the way that you move or how you live your life or what you do.

There’s something about the strengthen your muscles, the balance and strengthen your muscles, that is setting you up to gradually over time, injure your meniscus. And if that problem isn’t addressed, which it can be, and we see it here all the time, and we fix it here all the time in the clinic. If that problem isn’t addressed, then you’re likely going to have another knee injury after having the surgery.

Now some doctors will send you the physical therapy, which is a great thing if appropriate. But what you have to understand about physical therapy is most clinics are set up to help people that have had surgery, and they’re there for physical therapy after surgery. And if you’ve had a meniscus surgery, fantastic, you’re probably going to go to the right place if you just pick any physical therapy clinic.

But if you’re looking to heal your meniscus and avoid having the surgery possibly, then it’s important that you find a specialist physical therapist that knows how to handle the situation. Because likely there’ll be joint restriction stuck parts of the joint alignment problems, soft tissue restrictions need to be worked out by hand.

There’s specific exercises that aren’t the cookie cutter exercises that somebody needs to do after surgery that need to be identified and shown to the patient and progressed over time. And then it’s a little tricky getting back to the activities a person was doing before being able to squat all the way possibly run or jog, or just be able to be on their feet as long as they want can take some coaching and time. And if you’re going to a clinic that is set up to help people after surgery, they’ll probably be a lot of people there that have had surgery.

There’s usually lots of machines, lots of assistants that are just taking people through a circuit of exercises, which is perfect if you’ve had surgery, but like I said, if you’re trying to avoid it, if you’re trying to make sure that you heal naturally, it may not be specific enough to help you in your specific problem and address the root of it so that you’re not having another meniscus flare up again in six months or a year or two after you go through physical therapy.

If you think that we might be able to help you out with your meniscus problem that I want to invite you to apply for a complimentary discovery visit. We have a few of these reserved each week. And there’s a bit of an application process. But you can get a 20 minute free discovery visit where you get to sit down with a specialist physical therapist and we check you by hand we listen to your story.

We make sure that you’re you’ve got the type of knee problem that we can help you in the clinic naturally without surgery, so that you can get back to doing all the things that you love to be in on your feet as long as much as you want to exercise or been able to do things around your house. All our physical therapists have specialist training that allows him to properly handle a meniscus injury without surgery.

If you want to get one of these complimentary discovery visits then like I said you’ve got to apply or you got to do is find the button down below that says apply for a discovery visit. Once you click on that a formal pop up, leave us your details. And once you submit that to us then my staff will get that will give you a call back as fast as they can so they can discuss with you the next steps about applying for a discovery visit. hope that we can help you out with your knee problem and hope you have a wonderful day.