What happens if the leg length discrepancy after knee replacement surgery is left untreated?
What happens if a leg length discrepancy after knee replacement surgery goes untreated, the first thing that starts to happen is other body parts begin to hurt, you’ve had a knee replacement, of course, you’re recovering from that.
But if now that leg is longer, which is usually the case, you’re going to be limping slightly off to the shorter side. And it’s just a matter of time before the hips begin to hurt your feet and ankles can cause pain as well, where your lower back can begin to hurt. And especially the other knee, the one that wasn’t operated on recently that one can become troublesome too.
The reason for this is because of the altered mechanics from one leg being longer than the other, you can start to shift your body weight unevenly begin to compensate with muscles more so than you already have possibly. And this can begin to add excessive compression to joints, that can cause pain, as well as in the tendons and ligaments.
There’s other structures, it’s not just the joints that hurt. But other structures can be overstressed as well. The second thing that can happen is arthritis can develop in these joints, or it can worsen if it’s already present. If you already have hip arthritis, for instance, or knee arthritis in the other knee that wasn’t operated on, but maybe it’s just not as bad, it’s very likely that that’s going to get worse.
If now you have a leg length discrepancy that you’re not doing anything about overtime, the bad mechanics begin to wear down the cartilage and the bone begins to adapt, which is exactly what they’re looking for on an x ray, the thickening of the bone on the ends of the thigh bone in the shin bone, that’s what they’ll determine is knee arthritis. And if it gets bad enough, that’s when a doctor is looking to do a knee replacement surgery.
The third thing is that quality of life can be greatly reduced. Think about it if you’re in pain, because your hips hurt more your other knee hurts more your back, your feet hurt too, you’re less likely to go to exercise. And it’s probably the case that you need to be doing exercise in order to treat the aches and pains that you have.
But it isn’t fun to go do it because you’re in pain already. So you get into this cycle of not wanting to exercise and if you do try to exercise it hurts more, and you don’t want to exercise again. And the reality is that with a leg length discrepancy, when there’s a difference between your leg lengths, some machines might not work for you in the gym, some exercises may not be good for you.
You need to understand what’s best for you in your situation, so that you can properly exercise without aggravating your hips, your back or your feet or your other knee. Let me tell you how to end this pain cycle.
The first thing that needs to happen is you need to identify where the compensations are where you’re using muscles too much. And when you’re not using muscles enough, then you need to strengthen the weaker muscles. And this is what I call correcting a muscle imbalance. This is what puts the right amounts of pressure around joints.
Even if you have a leg length discrepancy and you still feel like you’re going to walk with a limp. If you have improved balance of muscles around the joints, you’re going to disperse you’re going to use forces around that joint much more normally the way that it’s intended, so that that joint is happier for the long term.
The most common muscle imbalance or compensation that happens in a knee especially after a knee replacement is if the quad muscles the ones that are on the front of the thigh are too strong or too dominant, and the glute muscles up behind the hip are too weak and those muscles oppose each other greatly. And so if you don’t have enough glute strength in the thigh muscles begin to be used too much.
And because of their connection down with the knee joint, they’ll compress the knee joint and possibly injure your replace knee definitely cause problems up in the hip and even down into the foot and ankle and cause problems on the other leg to it. Unfortunately, a knee replacement does not fix this muscle imbalance.
It replaces the knee joint so that there’s no more arthritis, but you can still put bad pressures through this leg if you have the muscle imbalance. You’ve got to strengthen the weakest muscles and knowing which muscles are strengthened can be different from person to person. But if you can strengthen these muscles and correct the muscle imbalance, fix the compensations.
Then you can get so strong that you can make your leg length discrepancy irrelevance where it doesn’t essentially matter where you can compensate with a shoe lift on one side and external shoe lift or maybe even use a cane. But because of your muscle imbalances being corrected, your joints are going to last much longer and you’re probably going to feel like you can get by without having any sort of surgical intervention.
And without making it a big deal that you have a leg length discrepancy. I talk extensively about chronic pain after knee replacements here on this channel. In fact, I’ve got a playlist of all our videos related to knee replacement help. It’s called the knee replacement pain help playlist and it’s linked in the description below in case you want to check out more of our videos.
I’ve also got a program called the failed knee replacement recovery program. There’s a link for you to learn more about that in the description as well. Thanks so much for watching. I hope this video was helpful for you.
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