Hey, guys!

It’s Dr. David Middaugh, physical therapist for El Paso Manual Physical Therapy and I wanted to share this story with you about this client of ours who we just finished seeing for her second visit.

She’s 54 years old and lives here in El Paso.

She’s got two grandchildren that she has not been able to play with. They’re little babies.

One is three and the other is one.

So they’re moving around a lot right now and she’s been frustrated because every time she takes of them, her knees start to ache and she just dreads the pain that she’s in by the end of the day taking care of her grandchildren

Okay, sorry I got a phone call.

Anyways, so what happened to her, she’s been having pain off and on for 10 years.

She actually had a knee surgery done, an arthroscopic meniscectomy, meaning they went in and snipped a piece of her meniscus, a piece of cartilage off of the inside of her knee.

It got a little bit better for a while afterwards but then the pain came back.

It actually ended up worsening about six months later and it’s just been miserable.

Every time she’s up on her feet for more than 20 or 30 minutes, the pain starts getting worst and worst and if she’s got a day where she has to walk a lot, the pain just kills her by the end of the day and into the next day, sometimes several days in a row.

So here’s the one thing that I showed her at our first visit that we’re going to build on and it’s such a simple thing but it’s so overlooked and if she would have known this prior to getting her surgery, she probably could have avoided getting that surgery altogether, would have no problem playing with her grandchildren right now.

But it is super simple.

Let me show you what’s going on.

So if you see my knees right here and my feet, every time my client was going to go stand up, she was keeping her legs together and her knees would push in together whenever she was going to stand up and that’s when she would get some pain in that right knee.

It would flare up at that moment.

So every time she goes to stand up, she was doing this, knees in and when she’d sit down, she’d do the same thing.

So what I instructed her to do is just open up the knees a little bit and stand up like that.

Now, she likes to wear dresses and skirts so I told her of course, be modest if you’re wearing a skirt or dress and you want to make sure you’re covered up but if you’re wearing pants or something else that it’s not a problem, make sure that you put some space between your knees like this whenever you go to stand up and sit down.

Instantly, she’d been having pain all the time whenever she go to stand up and sit down, that’s what she said, I asked her, “When does your pain hurt?”

She said, “Let me show you. Every time I do this, I stand up and sit down, there it is, it’s right there.

If I do it several times, it gets worse.”

So when I showed her how to stand up and sit down better, it instantly got better. She just lined up her knees correctly.

The joints started to move better and she got some relief.

She started practicing that.

It was kind of hard because every time you go to stand up and sit down, this of all the times you do that throughout the day, getting out of the car, stand up and sitting down at a restaurant, going to go sit down at your kitchen table, sitting down in your living room, sitting down at the edge of the bed, at work, standing and sitting down.

Think of all the times that you are up and down, up and down.

She’s having to think about it.

The good and bad thing about it is she’s getting pain all the time so she’s reminded of when she needs to do it because it hurts.

So she’s having to think about it quite a bit.

But this dropped her pain down significantly.

She was able to take care of her kids.

She came back today and told us she took care of her kids over the weekend for about six, seven hours and had zero knee pain afterwards and she was getting up and down from the ground and getting up and down from chairs with the little babies, having her knees coming in all the time and constantly aggravating her knees.

So moving forward, we got to work on some other stuff now, strength.

It’s all downhill from this point.

She’s going to start to get a lot of relief.

So I just wanted to share this story because if there’s any of you out there that are dealing with chronic knee pain, especially if you’re considering getting a surgery, especially if it’s meniscus related, I highly encourage you to talk to us.

There maybe some simple fixes that we can come up with that can give you some instantaneous relief and sets you on the path to getting better so that you never have to have a surgery.

Try this thing out.

So just to review on more time.

If you find yourself standing up with your knees coming in and then sitting down like that, change it so that your knees stay right over your feet and don’t knock in together.

So just like that every single time.

Guys, if you have any relief trying that out, if you have knee pain, please let me know.

I love to hear back from people that try out the stuff that we show on our videos and get some relief, get some benefit out of it.

Thank you so much.

Have a wonderful day.