Do you have pain in your knee?

Knee injuries are often debilitating, and it can be frustrating to find the right treatment. There are more than 25 common knee injuries, and most of them can be treated by hands-on techniques.

A series of simple tests can determine exactly what’s injured.  When you don’t take care of a knee injury right away, you often compensate and develop four or five different injuries in the same knee.

Pain in the knee can be caused by injuries to the deep ligaments or cartilage that’s located toward the center of your knee or these ligaments and tendons near the surface of the knee.

These are the collateral ligaments. They are right under the skin and stabilize your knee during side-to-side movements. The coronary ligaments, which limit the rotation of your lower leg, are also at the surface. They can only be touched if the knee is bent.

When you plant your foot and rotate your knee too much, this is the ligament that usually gets injured. When any of these ligaments are injured, the knee usually swells, and it’s hard to bring your heel to your buttock.

And last of the surface structures, you have a large tendon at the front of the knee that has seven different parts that often get injured. Injuries commonly occur just above the knee, below the knee, or at the sides of the knee.

Injury to the lower part just below the kneecap is one of the most common problems. When this tendon is injured, it causes a lot of pain going up and down stairs. This section below the kneecap is technically a ligament because it goes from bone to bone but functions as a tendon that helps you straighten your knee.

Most knee injuries are near the surface of the knee and occur in these four ligaments and the large tendon surrounding your kneecap that we just discussed.  Fortunately, they can easily be treated with manual therapy.

When the injury is deep inside the knee, it could be this strained ligament in the middle of the knee on the left or a broken meniscus, often referred to as a torn cartilage on the right. With these more serious injuries, healing can take a long time or require surgery.

The cases I see involve the superficial ligaments and different parts of the tendon at the front of the knee. The treatment is straightforward and very effective. Clients are also given a series of exercises to speed up the healing process.

The most important thing is to figure out exactly what’s injured so you don’t waste your time and your money. If you have pain in your knee, I can probably help you, and if I can’t, I’ll refer you to someone who can.