Don’t Make These Knee Pain Mistakes!

Are you struggling to walk your dog? Do stairs make you groan? Does it take you an hour to warm up your knees in the morning? If you’ve got knee pain, then this blog is really important for you to read.

Here at Parkside, we’ve treated 45,000 people over the last 21 years, and knee pain is one of the top three conditions that we see. Here are three mistakes that a lot of people make that could actually be making your knee pain worse. Hardly anyone knows these mistakes, and you might be making them right now.

What’s really frustrating to us as physios, is that these mistakes are often driven by the modern medical system. That’s right, the treatment that you’re receiving could actually be making you worse. Let’s go on, and go through the three biggest mistakes.

1. Complete Rest. So mistake number one, is to rest completely and stop doing any form of exercise. This is a big problem because often your knee will get stiff and the muscles around your knee will get weak, you’ll lose fitness and most of us will put on some weight. This is a bigger problem because it starts a downward spiral where your knee joint gets more load and the muscles that support your knee get weaker and as a result your pain will get worse. So, even the angriest of knee will respond to some form of exercise that will help you improve your strength and maintain your mobility. Our expertise as physios is to find that exercise and encourage you to do as much as possible to stay as active as you can.

2. Getting scared by a scan. Mistake two is to have an x-ray or MRI. These almost always show minor findings like meniscal wear and joint damage that are not necessarily causing your pain. How’s this? 43 percent of healthy people over 40 with uninjured, pain-free knees have signs of osteoarthritis on an MRI. Being told you have arthritis early in your life, often leads us to decreased activity and unhealthy lifestyle, even for decades.

3. Unnecessary surgery After resting and having x-ray or an MRI, a lot of people are sent to a specialist and end up having an arthroscopy on their knee. This is a massive problem, because exercise and weight management are far better choices for knee pain than having surgery. We see lots of patients who have repeat arthroscopies over a decade before eventually having an early total knee replacement. Instead, everybody with knee pain could have a structured, graduated exercise program for at least three months.

Hope you found those three tips valuable, please if you’ve liked this information, get it out there and help us share it. We’d love to spread this message out to more people with knee pain. If you have knee pain we have love to help you out. We can offer one on one assessment and rehab programs or you can join our GLA;D group exercise classes for people with knee or hip arthritis. Click here to find out more