What’s up, guys? Dr. Greg here at Paramount Chiropractic. We’re talking today about some of the common causes of knee pain.
ACL, PCL, MCL, and LCL Injuries
Some of those big ones that kind of just jump right out of the gate are sports injuries like ACL tears, PCL tears, and MCL tears, like I did myself playing college hockey. I took a knee-to-knee hit and tore that MCL right on the inside of the knee.
If you’ve had sports injuries in the past or you’ve had some work injuries, the ACL can be one of those big ones. Anatomy-wise, it lies right under the patella, coming from the femur down into the tibia. These get injured mostly from rotational forces where our leg is planted and we twist and rotate.
The knee only has about five degrees of rotation, and that can cause tearing of the ACL ligament that holds your knee and stabilizes your knee from moving forward and backward.
The one that I did was my MCL playing hockey. I took a knee-to-knee hit and had a grade 2 tear. These ligaments here, the MCL and LCL, keep your knee from going left and right, so these are huge. The MCL is a huge ligament for stabilizing your knee, but it can become injured just like any other tissue in the body.
Meniscus Injuries
The next one would be a meniscus injury. These can sometimes go hand in hand, unfortunately. You can have that unhappy triad, as they call it, where an ACL, meniscus, and MCL injury can happen all at once.
When you have that torquing or twisting motion of the knee, it can tear the medial meniscus or lateral meniscus. A meniscus injury might feel like pain with squatting. Going up and down stairs can be really painful, as can bending the knee and loading the knee like that—coming down and putting that forceful stress or force on the knee joint itself.
The meniscus might pop, click, or lock on you. Those are typically symptoms of a meniscus injury.
Patellar Tendonitis
With some of the repetitive stressors on the knee, if you’re a runner or an athlete, you can get patellar tendonitis, which is right through here. Your patellar tendon forms from that quadriceps muscle, runs across the patella, and inserts on the front of the tibia.
With too much wear and tear, that patellar tendon can get pretty aggravated and inflamed. We have great technology in here with the SoftWave and our laser that can help knock that inflammation out and help your patellar tendonitis heal pretty quickly if you are struggling with that.
Osteoarthritis and Wear and Tear
The biggie here, when we do a lot of our knee pain program, is osteoarthritis—that wear and tear of the knee joint that just kind of breaks down over time.
We’ve all got our stressors, whether we’ve had previous trauma, sports injuries, or wear and tear. A lot of times nowadays, we’re sitting too much, and our knee gets in this flexed position a lot. There’s a lot of tension that comes through those tissues when they don’t move properly biomechanically.
These things can add up over time, and if we don’t have the proper movement and stabilization of our knee, it slowly starts to break down.
Finding the Root Cause of Knee Pain
One of the things that we do in the office is, obviously, an evaluation to see what caused your injury and an in-depth history. We want to find out the root cause of why you’re dealing with these knee issues.
It could be something simple. Maybe there’s just some inflammation in there from overuse, or there’s wear and tear over time with an osteoarthritic type of knee.
A lot of times, people come into the office after they’ve been to the ortho or the medical doctor, and they’re just given steroids and drugs. They’re told they’re bone on bone and are going to have to have surgery and a knee replacement.
A lot of times, we can prevent that from happening with the things we can do in the office, along the lines of our Knee On Trac, our laser, our SoftWave, adjusting the knee, and our Trigenics program. These can help the knee fire and stabilize properly through that brain-body connection and your neurology, which controls all the tissue in your body.
We want to make sure that, from all aspects here, we’re taking those into account so we can really help your knee heal and function better and prevent these surgeries and injections that, a lot of times, aren’t fixing the issue.
If you guys are struggling with knee pain, you’ve had knee injuries in the past, or you’re curious if we can help you out, give us a call. We’d be glad to check you out and see what’s going on.
