Why Your Doctor Said You’ll Need A Knee Replacement

Are you suffering from a knee problem and you’ve visited your doctor or your surgeon, and they’re saying that you’re probably going to need a knee surgery soon? Whether it’s next month or next year, or in 10 years, or 15 or 20 years. That’s a scary thing to hear. We often hear patients say that to us here in the clinic. And the good news is they escape having to have a surgery.

I’m going to tell you all about that in today’s video. Real quick, my name is Dr. David Middaugh, I’m a specialist physical therapist over at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy, I’ve been helping out people with knee problems for years now. And we often get people here in the clinic that have had this experience where they go see their doctor, they go see their surgeon, or maybe their physician, and especially if they’ve been visiting this doctor many times for the same problem, the doctor might lay out the words that just incite fear in the individual.

They say, “you’re probably going to need knee surgery soon”. And oftentimes, it’s a knee replacement they’re talking about. They say you’re going to need a knee replacement in 10 years, or in five years, or sometimes even next year, or you need one right away.

Well, I’m going to tell you about why doctors say that, and I’m going to get from the perspective of a surgeon here for a second. And what you have to realize about surgeons is they’re they have a great specialty, and I’m not throwing anybody under the bus here, I want you to know that I highly respect surgeons and their work and the help that they can give people for what they do. It is a tremendous amount of schooling and knowledge and, and it makes an enormous difference in the person that absolutely needs a surgery.

It really is a game changer for them. And there are people that we see here in the clinic that we tell them no, you need to go get surgery, you don’t need to be here in the clinic with us. This is not a situation where we can help you out non surgically, you have to go to a surgeon. But for many cases, we do see people that can avoid seeing the surgeon.

Now from the surgeon’s perspective, they’re looking at things that are torn, very degenerated, very worn out, extremely worn out. In those situations, surgery truly might be the best situation for that patient, the best treatment for that patient. But in cases where the level of injury is more mild or even moderate, it’s usually manageable without surgery.

Now when I say manageable, I mean will the person be hundred percent? Likely not, they won’t be able to run and jump just like they used to when they were, you know, 21 or 22 years old. But does that person even want to run and jump? A lot of times people are just happy to go get on a treadmill or walk outside for exercise and be able to keep up around the house and with family.

If they can do that without the knees, slowing them down, then that’s a successful situation. And having a little bit of arthritis in a knee or a meniscus problem, or whatever the injury might be in the knee cartilage problem, it’s tolerable. And as long as it’s not slowing them down completely, we can put off having a surgery and that’s a good situation.

Surgeons went to school to look at MRIs, x rays, CT scans, all those imaging studies they look at, to peek inside people inside the joints, and find things to fix. What they did not go to school for, most of the time, is how to rehabilitate, how to fix a knee problem without surgery. And so when they’re looking at somebody who’s in front of them with a knee problem and trying to figure out how to best help them, they’re going to come from an angle of sharing the knowledge and being able to help out the person with the knowledge that they know and understand and have a great handle on.

So if you’re looking for a non-surgical option from a surgeon, it’s going to be kind of challenging. Now most surgeons that I know and hear from, patients say that they do really try stuff that’s non-surgical, they’ll try pills, injections, and of course sending patients to physical therapy. But it doesn’t always work out for them.

Obviously, they keep going back into the surgeon’s office because it didn’t work out. It’s just a matter of time before that surgeon is going to say you’re going to need a surgery. And what happens oftentimes is they’ll do a more less invasive surgery meaning like a meniscectomy is a common less invasive surgery where they just go in and clean up the joint or snip off a few torn edges of the joints so that the joint can operate better.

But then the surgeons do say, hey, it was pretty bad in there. You got some arthritis going, you got a lot of degeneration. This fix that I made should be able to hold you over for a while. But here comes the bad part. It’s going to be about five to 10 years before you’re going to be back in here and we’re going to need to do a knee replacement.

And that’s just terrifying for the patient especially they just had a surgery, you know, within the past year or two and they’re thinking you know what, I went through that surgery that was no fun. fun to have a knee replacement, which is a massive surgery. That doesn’t sound like fun to me. And then plus, I know some people who had an knee replacement, they’re not doing too good, and it didn’t go well for them either.

Well, that’s the perspective you get from a surgeon. Now, the other end of this is, people rarely go through the lifestyle changes needed in order to fix a knee problem for the long term. Let me unpack that a bit more for you.

Let’s just use the example of weight loss. For instance, if you’ve ever dealt with a weight problem, which most people have, that’s completely normal, generally, you understand that the less eat, the more weight you’ll lose, or the more exercise you do along income in combination with eating less, overall less calories. That usually allows you to keep your weight under control. That’s a very generalized view, there’s a lot of specifics that go into that.

So in case you’re ready to pick that apart, understand, I can go toe to toe with you on all that. But I’m just giving you a general view of health and nutrition. If you reduce your calorie intake, then what you need, then you’re going to lose weight is the bottom line. Now, changing your calorie intake is not an easy feat. I mean, some people have a switch that they can flip and immediately stop eating the cake and the junk food. And that’s great for them.

But the average person has a hard time when the weekend comes around and or at the office, they bring desserts and you want to try that or the holidays come around and you want to splurge. It’s it’s challenging, but keeping up those lifestyle changes for the long term is really what needs to happen to manage the weight for the long term so that there isn’t you know, getting bigger and then getting slimming down and doing that yo-yo dieting things I’m talking about.

People do the same thing with the problems where they, they yo-yo treat it. In other words, they’ll do something for it, that makes it better. But then they don’t keep it up for the long term and it gets worse again. And then they try something else thinking that that thing they tried in the past didn’t work. And it might get better. But then it gets worse again, once they stopped doing that thing that was helping them out. And then doing the type of treatment is important to just like the type of diets important.

I mean, I’ve heard all kinds of extreme diets out there that are not healthy to keep up for the long term, they’re not a good long term solution, they might work in the short term and allow you to lose that 10, 15, 20 pounds really fast. But it’s not a sustainable diet that somebody can keep up for the long term and manage their weight for the long term. That’s why the yo-yo dieting happens. Same thing with knee treatments.

That’s why some things work for a period of time, but then you give it up and then the problem comes back. fixing a neat problem for the long term truly requires some lifestyle changes, just like managing weight for the long term requires lifestyle changes. And going through those lifestyle changes can be challenging and finding the right ones for the individual within the problem for you is tricky.

And working with a specialist is one of the best ways to do it and thinking about it. And it’s not really wise to just follow somebody’s instructions. 100% without really internalizing it, thinking about it and figuring out how it fits in your lifestyle. Same thing with diet like you can follow a diet, but chances are you’re going to modify that recipe. If you put a little more salt or a little more cream or sugar.

Knowing that you’re going to walk extra to offload that that extra those extra calories that you took in, it’s the same thing with a knee problem, you might find that the way that somebody told you to do a knee exercise needs to be modified for your lifestyle. This is all information that a surgeon just isn’t good at giving you and weighing out and they just aren’t following up with you enough to do that.

Here at our clinic, the nature of physical therapy is we do repetitive treatments over time because we can really guide somebody through the entire pathway and allow them to make those lifelong changes. carry them through the beginning of it anyway and follow up with them afterwards that they can keep up those changes for the long term and truly heal a knee problem for the long term to escape surgery and not have to rely on painkillers or injections to the knee.

This is why your doctor might have told you that you’ll need surgery in a few years or at some point in the future because they don’t see people that go through those changes. Now if you’re watching this right now and you’re thinking I want to do that. Well, first off, let me let me just plug our program here we have a program called the 28-Day Knee Health And Wellness Boost Program.

This program is me walking you through all the exercises that progressions that we put our patients through here in the clinic in order to improve their need health for the long term. These are habits that you can build. And I talked about adaptations modifications for the exercises, so that you can adapt it to your current injury level or your current ability to because you might not be strong enough to do a certain version of the exercise.

But there’s other options that you can do and then work your way up over time. This program is highly adaptable, so that it fits many people with many different types of need problems. So if you’re thinking of trying out this program, go up to the top of our website here where it says products, and click on that and you’ll see where we have access to the 28 day program on there.

If you get access to that program, you will be taken through all the steps on a on a regimen on a on a self-paced regimen. So, you can start and stop as you need to. And it’s 100% online so that you can do that from home. The main point that I want you to take away from this video today is that if you’re one of those people that were told that you might need surgery here soon, don’t take it at face value.

Don’t let that be part of your identity moving forward, that you’re that patient that’s going to go back to that surgeon’s office and have to have a knee surgery at some point. You don’t have to be that person, if you take the right steps and take the right angle and love your doctor for it. By the way, they’re doing the best they can with the knowledge that they know to help you out, they really want to help you out.

But you’ve got to take it, you can’t take it at face value, you’ve got to apply your own knowledge to this situation, you can be the person that avoided surgery, injections and medications. But you’ve got to go about this the right way. You’ve got to change your lifestyle, you’ve got to make sure that you do the right things to avoid having a knee surgery in the future or a second knee surgery if you’ve already had one.

Hey, if you think that we might be able to help you out with your knee problem, we’d love to learn more about you so that we can figure out if we’re the best fit for you. All you have to do is go up to the top of our website here and find the tab there that says cost and availability. Click on that you’ll get taken to a page where you can leave us our details. Want to hear all about you.

Once you submit that form, one of my staff will call you back right away so that they can talk about what you submitted on there with us and see if you’re the right type of the problem that we can help escape surgery. Avoid injections and painkillers so that you can get back to being active, healthy and mobile again, without having to worry about your knees getting worse over time. I hope that we can be a part of your success story really soon. Have a wonderful day. Bye