Question about a Knee Injury

[Anita18]

It sounds like you have tendon or ligament damage, if it isn't the bone. Weakness of the knee usually comes from connective tissue - the patella actually doesn't do much besides be there for the ligaments to connect to. That kind of thing can be very hard to heal, and a lot of people aren't ever really the same after a connective tissue injury.

I really don't know what to tell you in terms of treatments. A close friend of mine started getting knee problems a few years ago, real bad. She has to quit her job in a vet clinic soon since she can't stand for long periods of time. She's gone to a lot of doctors and specialists, and none of them have really pinpointed what's wrong. She seemed to get better when she had custom insoles made (I was hoping that it was just an arch problem), but now they're hurting again. It's just really frustrating. Physical therapy is also a catch-22 in theory: in order to strengthen the knee, you have to work the muscles and connective tissue around it. To do that, you have to bend it. BUT, having bad knees usually means you can't bend them. It's like, "Okay...."

I agree that the human body hasn't quite finished the whole bipedal evolution thing yet. Not that quadripeds have it any better - three-legged dogs don't get around so hot and horses with one bad leg are usually euthanized. When one leg is bad, all of the muscles in the horse try to compensate for it and it leads to problems in internal organs. Not very pretty....

So yeah. Good luck with that! Find lots and lots of second opinions!

 

[November Rain]

Dew, Have you ever considered perhaps doing physio theraphy to strengthen the leg muscles around your patella which would then keep it in it's correct position more often and give it less tendency to dislocate.

my knees used to dislocate a lot when i was younger and the last time i think it happened was around a year ago, hurts like crazy.

anyway, they have died down due to some physio theraphy exercises i was doing. At the time, they were actually also asking me to tape my knee across my leg towards the middle so there was less chance of it slipping outwards.

Since i'm not qualified, i think giving you exercises is a lil naive but i do reccommend you see a physio therapist and go crazy with your reps in order to get your legs back into super duper working order. probably the best thing i've ever done, it reverted me having to have permanent surgery to replace my patella.

the thing is the more it dislocates, the worse it will become because the muscles and tendons are getting used to the abnormal stretching that occurs with dislocation which just means your legs are more likely to see it happen again, so what you need to do i think is retrain the muscles in your leg to become taut (as well as the tendons and connecting tissues (ligaments)) so this is less likely to happen in the future.

also perhaps seeing a podiatrist about possibly getting some special insoles may help as one of the reasons my feet were dislocating came because i was flat footed and i wasn't distributing my weight around properly when i was walking , as well as other things.


good luck and apologies with your pain.