AC L tears are one of the most common
knee injuries in both professional and amateur athletes.
Yeah, for years, people thought a torn AC L meant that you are doomed to surgery.
Well, now, good news, new research suggests.
Otherwise our nine health expert, Dr Paul Coley joining us.
Now to explain a little bit more about this.
Wait, so first, just give a little background,
the most common ways that this happens.
Yes.
Our AC L anterior cruciate ligament,
it's actually a little sort of triangular ligament in our knee.
And what it does is it stabilizes the knee so it prevents internal rotation
and it also prevents this bone from coming forward of, of the femur,
which is our big bone here.
So it's really good stabilizing.
But if we plant our leg and do a quick pivot, we could very easily tear.
Did you just hear us win? Because we knew
what that we know what that pain feels like.
Uh For a lot of people, you know,
this is the injury that they don't wanna get because one,
the injury itself is painful,
but the surgery, it's, it's not an easy and quick recovery. It's not.
And we, for the longest time as you said, thought that, you know,
ligaments don't heal themselves, we have to prepare them.
So we either have to go in and take, you know,
tissue from somewhere else and actually reconstruct the ligament or
we have to kind of sew it together again.
Um, and you can imagine for athletes,
it's really important to get back to play very quickly
and we know in football and soccer and basketball,
many of these, you can have these types of injuries.
So,
but now this study is really sort of making us question whether we were doing it wrong
all along because we know that even if you go and have a reconstruction and a repair,
there's a one in three chance you'll need more surgery after that,
it just doesn't heal quite the same.
So this is a good use for people going forward
while the people already had their surgery.
So, so explain that a little bit more.
So, what,
what is the study exactly saying that it just
heals on itself or what is it indicating?
So what happens when we break a bone? How do we get it to heal?
We sort of immobilize it, right?
We bring the pieces together and we allow the body to do its thing and sort of heal it.
So it's the idea of applying that sort of philosophy to the
ligaments which we thought we just had to sew up or replace,
but putting your knee in a brace, immobilizing it at 90 degrees.
And then over the next three months,
slowly sort of adjusting the brace to improve the range of motion
and doing a lot of physical therapy.
So this is not a great option for someone who has to get back to play.
But for most of us, if we get a workplace injury or home injury,
this is a really great way to avoid surgery, which can be painful,
which can be unsuccessful,
which can have complications and result in less range of motion.
And what we saw in MRI is that people who wore this brace and did this kind of thing,
90% of them showed signs of healing of that ligament.
Now, this is my question because we talked about which one is quicker,
which one helps you heal a little bit better?
Is there a better like quality of healing with
one of these operations or one of the choices?
We're thinking the conservative option may actually be
because you can always reach for surgery if you need to later.
And the surgery itself sometimes causes more edema, more inflammation,
more trauma to the joint.
You get what we call collateral damage because you're mucking around in there.
And of course, the anesthesia complications that time out of work.
So many of us are now thinking although we don't yet have long term studies
because this is kind of a really new concept when you have a ligamentous injury,
whether it's in the knee, whether it's in the shoulder,
maybe we do this first,
we bring the pieces of the ligament together. We allow the body to do its thing.
And that may actually result in better range of motion, better functional status,
long term
and less likely to have a recurrent need for procedure. We
always have to remind ourselves
how smart our bodies are. They know what they're doing if we let them do the work.
Fascinating. And that changes the outcome for so many, many
people in,
for us as women. We're more, we likely actually to tear our a cli was gonna
ask
because we have less muscle mass around the, the bone, uh around the knee joint.
And because our ligaments are a little bit stretchier.
So it's even a game changer for a lot of women, especially as they get older,
post menopausal.
We don't wanna put them through that.
She looked at
me because she wants more sympathy on this. I do have sympathy.
Thank you so much for your time. That's really fascinating. We appreciate it.