Knee Pain?

Knee Pain can drive you crazy. Simply bending to pick up a pen can be painful or impossible task. Finding relief can often been difficult sitting, standing and walking all often cause discomfort.

What Causes Knee Pain?

Knee pain has a number of causes, so there is no one answer to this problem. I will touch on a few of the problems. (For a more specific answer to your particular knee pain, schedule an appointment.) Knee pain can also be the cause of gaining weight. When you have pain in your knees, it’s difficult to find any type of exercise that can be done. This fact compounds your problem because as you gain weight, you put even more strain on your knees.

Hip Disorders

The most common cause of knee pain that I see is not actually from any direct injury to the knee itself, it is a problem in the hip that is the culprit. The two hip bones are supposed to pivot on the sacrum every time you take a step. When this pivot happens, it allows the whole leg to line up correctly when you heel strikes the ground. If the hip is locked, however, then the leg is not lined up correctly and the knee joint gets stressed. Now obviously, the stress of one step isn’t going to produce any bad long term effects on the knee, but when you are stressing it with hundreds if not thousands of steps every day, month after month, the knee can undergo some pretty traumatic abuse as those steps add up. The term arthritis is used to describe a joint that is degenerating and this type of low impact but long term trauma can cause pretty dramatic changes to the knee.

Foot Disorders

At the other end of the leg is the foot. It has 26 bones that come together at 33 joints. If one of the joints is not functioning correctly, this can also have a huge impact on the health of the knee. In this case, as the heel strikes the ground, it does so at an awkward angle because of the foot not having the proper flexibility. I remember the first time I learned this lesson. I was in chiropractic school and had some knee pain when I was in a class about adjusting knees. The instructor asked for a volunteer and called on me. He did a quick assessment on my knee then took off my shoe and did something to my foot. I felt a big “Clunk” and a strain that I wasn’t even aware was there in my foot was immediately relieved and that relief traveled almost instantly to my knee. All of the sudden I could walk normally again.

Knee Problems

Sometimes the pain really is in the knee. Maybe you jammed it or tried to turn too quickly. Maybe you tried to stop or were pushed sideways, whatever the reason, the problem could actually be in the knee itself.

The longer you have these biomedical problems, the worse your knee will degenerate.  So it is important to get help as soon as you feel there is a problem.

A quick assessment to find out where the problem started will be necessary to have long lasting effects. Depending on the severity of the problem, we may use acupuncture and / or cold laser along with the chiropractic adjustment.