Tag: therapy for knee pain

An Innovative Approach to Knee Pain

Here in San Diego, I see everyone from soldiers to civilians, and from athletes to couch potatoes. One constant among all my patients is an aversion to physical therapy, especially where chronic knee pain is concerned.

I get it: therapy is designed to push the limits of your comfort zone in an effort to increase mobility. But when that therapy proves too frustrating, a discouraging number of people simply give up altogether.

Now a group of researchers have discovered something that joggers with iPods have known for a while: keeping a steady beat can improve your performance in physical therapy:

[U]sing a device such as a metronome seemed to “fire up different parts of the brain”, allowing patients to workout without pain.

The audio “pacing” was accompanied by a single, heavy bout of stationary exercise, like weighted leg extension, targeted at the knee. The method resulted in 19 percent increased muscle strength over the 4 week trial.

Just one more good idea in our ongoing battle against the monotony of exercise, and the tyranny of pain. If your knee pain has lasted more than a few weeks, it’s time to see an orthopedic expert in San Diego. Please contact the offices of Dr. William Holland for an appointment today.

New Insights on Knee Pain

Knee pain is often a persistent nuisance, but for some people, it’s devastating. Because our knees drive nearly every motion we make while standing, chronic pain in this joint can have lasting and systemic effects on everything we do.

For many years, the conventional wisdom held that knee pain should be treated at the source – namely, the knee. But a new study recently found that knee pain can be relieved by focusing “upstream” as well, on the hip, thereby strengthening the entire leg as a system:

British and Australian scientists analyzed 14 previous studies of people with patellofemoral pain, the official name for the ache in the front of the knee that strikes many runners. Participants whose programs included moves to build strength, endurance, and activation in the muscles around the hip had less knee pain and improved joint function when compared with those whose therapy focused on the quadriceps muscles alone.

It is an interesting finding that underscores the simple fact that our bodies are full of interdependent pieces, and that no orthopedic issue ever arises in a vacuum. My San Diego orthopedic practice offers effective therapy, treatment and surgery for chronic knee pain, and takes care to treat entire patients young and old.

Want to learn more? Contact the orthopedic surgeons today.