30 Aug Permanent Knee Pain Relief in 5 Minutes [A One Treatment Case Study]

Permanent knee pain relief can be hard to come by, especially when you don’t want to stop exercising or moving the way human beings do.

Side-note And An Opportunity for Gratitude: Let’s see a show of hands from anyone who is grateful to be able to walk?

The knee is one of those joints that starts as a minor annoyance until it’s ignored for months to years and grows into a severe nuisance, stopping you from doing what you love to do.

Before we get into serious, kick-a$$ relief that lasts for the knee, let’s talk about tips for quick relief so that anyone who wants to keep abusing their bodies can stop reading ASAP. (Yes, that’s me being sarcastic.  I want you to be pain-free now. What I want more, though, is for you to be pain-free for decades. That means doing the right thing by your body in this moment.)

Quick Tips for Knee Pain Relief

What You Can Do Right Now – By Yourself:

• Ice
• Heat
• Advil/Aspirin
• Foam Roll

If one of the above is working for you, congratulations!  Feel free to stop reading now.

In regards to foam-rolling, when you become aware that foam rolling is only giving you temporary relief, remember to do as Albert Einstein suggests and:

Stop the insanity.

What You Can Do Within 24 Hours – With Help:

• Massage
• Acupuncture
• ARP Wave
• Electronic stimulation, ultrasound, or lasers – through your local physical therapist

The above interventions only require that you pick up the phone and call the nearest therapist with the technology you are looking for.

What You Can Do Over the Next Month – With Help To Permanently Get Rid of Your Pain and Prevent Any Structural Damage (cartilage or arthritis) From Getting Worse:

• Keep reading.

The Knee is The Victim of Other Joints

Most joints in your body take stress and become their own problems.

• Sit on your butt too long and you can get adhesion between your sciatic nerve and butt muscles. Adhesion at this location is the primary cause of hamstring tightness.
• Jump rope, bouncing on your calves and you can get adhesion in your calves.
• Use your hands typing way at a computer and you’ll get adhesion in your forearms, causing a failed wrist and finger extension test.

The knee is unique. Stress on the knee comes after you’ve put stress on your ankle and hips for a long period of time. It gets beats up as the victim of ankle and hip stresses.

Unless you experienced a trauma directly to the knee, almost all knee pain comes years after you’ve had compromised:

• Ankle Dorsiflexion – with your toes 6″ away from the wall, can your knee touch it with your heel down?
• Hip Flexion – lying on your back, can your thigh touch your ribs?
• Hip Extension – kneeling, can the front of your hip move 12″ in front of your knee?

You can see how the knee is tied in with the hip and ankle during a squat movement.

Even if you don’t exercise or squat, you sit down in a chair and get up from that chair dozens of times every day.  Every time you do, you’re either using a normal amount of stress on these joints or an excessive amount.

The answer is an excessive amount if any of the tests you’re doing now are not passing or 100%.

Take your closest friend and five minutes to test the above tests right now.

Once you’ve tested the joints up-stream and down-stream of your knee, test the knee itself:

• Knee Flexion – lying on your back, can your heel touch your butt?

Which joint is the most restricted?

Which is second most restricted?

Grade these in severity. Then, whatever treatment you do for these joints should be weighted towards the prioritized restrictions.

A More Permanent Fix for Knee Pain

Before you go and get treatment on your knee, it’s mandatory to get a diagnosis of your knee.

The diagnosis includes:

1. Your history of injuries to your lower body.
2. The above tests and a few others ones.
3. Imaging – most often, this includes an MRI.  X-rays don’t tell us much.
4. Your response to treatment.  You should notice permanent relief in your knee pain, no matter how long you’ve had the pain, in five treatments or less.

Without a diagnosis, you are shooting in the dark and risking continued pain and higher likelihood of structural damage.

By “structural damage,” I mean osteoarthritis, cartilage fraying and tearing, and other non-fixable conditions.

With a full, honest, and complete diagnosis, your expectations can be managed so that you know just how much activity you can do without causing yourself more pain.

Here’s a quick and dirty treatment of a young, male CrossFitter with recurring knee pain that was getting worse each time he had a flare-up. He was seeking not only knee pain relief, but he wanted to prevent flare-ups in the future.

The diagnosis for his knee pain was:

1. Joint inflammation
2. Adhesion in the knee capsule

Notice, there’s no discussion of the hips or ankles in his diagnosis. That’s because those ranges were more than 90% full and not a big priority.

Do you have knee pain that isn’t getting better even though it’s been months to years and you’ve seen at least 3-5 different doctors or therapists?

Give us a call at Barefoot Rehab. You won’t regret it.

Tell me, what has your experience been with getting permanent knee pain relief?

By Dr. Chris

Dr. Chris Stepien, DC, Full-Body ID Certified, ART Certified, CSCS, and CrossFit Level 1 Certified, fixes your annoying and frustrating pains, even when it's been over 6 months and you've seen 3-5 other doctors or therapists without lasting relief Barefoot Rehab in Denville, NJ. And when you're sad, depressed, or not enjoying life, Dr. Chris wants to hug you. He invites you to reach out, no matter what your concern is. Barefoot Rehab is here to serve you.