Knee pain is something millions of people deal with every day, but not everyone has to.
Today, I’m going to talk to you about some of the remedies we can do here at Sandstone Chiropractic to alleviate that. So whether it’s pain on the lateral aspect of your knee, whether you’re running and you feel that jolt, or a little catch in your knee, or maybe you’re golfing and you’re not hitting as far as you want to, by coming in and after doing an exam, and coming up with a diagnosis, we sit down, and we come up with a plan. One that fits you and your lifestyle and the amount of activity that you do. With knee pain, I’m going to tell you a few things you can be doing at home to help remedy the situation yourself.
One of the most common causes of knee pain in runners and people who do more strenuous activity is called Patellofemoral Syndrome. So with Patellofemoral Syndrome, we want to strengthen our quads. So, one of the basic ones that you don’t need any equipment for, is go and grab a towel. You’re going to lay down on the ground. You want to keep your knees bent with your back flat with a towel under the leg that we’re trying to strengthen. Put it right under the foot and while your back’s flat on the floor, you’re going to slide that out from you while applying pressure to the towel on the carpet, and that is a key here. You want to be on carpet. If you go on tile or wood, it’s probably going to be too easy for you. And our whole goal here is to strengthen the quad muscle. This is going to help stabilize the patella or your kneecap, and get it to a position to where it doesn’t track in an abnormal way and cause you pain.
Another thing you can do, one of the ones you’ve probably heard of, is ice right after you do have an injury. Icing and elevating it, although sounding cliche as you hear those all the time, are very beneficial and something that you should follow as a rule of thumb when you do have a knee injury.
At all our locations, we have state-of-the-art therapies that all follow our knee protocol. Starting with Knee on Track. Knee on Track’s great because it’s going to put space back into the joint of your knee. So, when you have arthritis, you’ve eliminated the cartilage between the bones. Once that’s gone, you’re bone on bone. What Knee on Track does, is it applies a set amount of pounds pressure to distract the knee, fitting that space that was once there, where that cartilage was, allowing for nutrition and a viscous lubricant material that you produce naturally, to go back to that position and give you that mobility that you once had.
Once we’ve got that space in your knee, then we’re going to move onto something called PEMF. It stands for Pulsed Electromagnetic Frequency. We first found that PEMF was used for astronauts in space to prevent bone atrophy. What it does is it promotes bone growth and tissue repair. It’s a pulsive electromagnetism that hits the fluid in your cells. It’s often referred to as cellular exercise. While it feels funny, it’s one of the most beneficial things we have. And, in a situation with a knee that has lost cartilage inside of it, we want to promote the bone growth because we want that joint as strong as possible, seeing as it has become less stable.
While your body is one of the greatest healers, we do have plenty of therapies to help speed that process along. The first thing we’re going to do is reduce the swelling and inflammation in your knee. Electric Stim is with these electrodes that go on the muscles surrounding the knee to help eliminate the muscle tension and swelling, depending on what frequency we set it to. Then we’re going to bring in our RRT, which stands for Rapid Release Technique. It’s like getting a 30 to 40-minute massage in about three or four minutes. And we apply that to your quads and the muscles in your calves to help loosen those muscles up.
Next, we’re going to bring in laser. While the laser sounds like something that could be painful, it’s absolutely not. It’s a cold laser, so it’s not even going to get warm. It’s not going to heat up. It’s not going to hurt you at all. It sits there and it penetrates the cells in your body to help stimulate a healing response. We see people get better about three times quicker with it than without it.
Knee pain’s not something you want to put off. It’s one of our primary mobility joints in our body. We don’t want to let a minor problem turn into a much larger one. If knee pain is something you experience everyday, or something that you think you have to deal with, you don’t. I mentioned a couple of different causes of knee pain today, but we treat many, many more. So, please don’t feel like you have to deal with that pain everyday. I hope this video helps you get the job done at home. But when it doesn’t, come see us here at Sandstone.
Call Sandstone or schedule your comprehensive exam with x-rays online.
