♪ Bob and Brad, ♪
the two most famous
physical therapists
on the internet.
- Hi folks. I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- Together, we are the most famous
physical therapists on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course.
- Today, we're gonna answer the question -
can your torn knee ligament heal on its own?
Big question, if you have a torn ligament.
- Yeah, you need to know this.
- Yeah, so the question is,
are you going to need surgery?
- Right.
- Which is pretty involved.
We'll talk a little about that.
A little bit about that later,
but you have four ligaments in your knee.
I'm gonna jump right into the demonstration,
here Brad.
So you have the two ligaments on the outside.
- Mhm. This one here, oh,
we'll get the kneecap out of the way.
The one in here, the inside or the MCL
and the LCL, lateral.
[Bob] That's the outside. That's the lateral.
[Brad] Oh that's right. I got the right leg there.
[Bob] They're attached to femur.
To either the tibia or the fibula.
So you see the lateral collateral ligament
attaches to the fibula.
This attaches femur to tibia.
Now there's also two ligaments inside and they cross,
and that's why they're called their name.
Anterior cruciate, the front cross,
and posterior cruciate, means the back cross.
[Brad] All right, so the cruciate means across,
and anterior/posterior gives the position.
And it's a ligament.
- Now there's only four ligaments that, well,
this patella tendon probably helps a little bit to.
Stability.
- Sure, stability.
- But they're the main sources of stability,
so if you tear one of these,
it's like a four legged stool
taking one leg out.
- Right.
- And it can really cause instability.
Now my understanding of how this works Brad,
it's very interesting in the body.
Let's say you tear one of the side ligaments.
The ends can actually find each other and heal.
- That is amazing.
- Isn't it amazing?
- Yeah.
- Now if you have happened to tear one of
the anterior cruciate or the poster cruciate,
and you always hear how terrible it is
to tear your ACL,
cause it could be career threatening or
it could be sports threatening.
The problem with that, there's fluid inside your knee.
And those two ends, they have trouble finding each other.
They, they fold around.
- Right. Well, they have no muscle in them.
So they can't indi- you know, move toward each other.
- Right, right.
- But evidently something's going on.
- Yeah. Sometimes I think they can find each other,
but it's very unlikely.
So usually as a rule of thumb,
if you tear one of the outside ligaments,
they will repair it and you can have a good result
if you tear one of the inside leg ligaments,
No, I-I'm sorry. That was wrong.
If you tear one of the outside ligaments,
they may not have to repair it.
- Okay.
- They may not do surgery.
If you tear the inside ligaments, ACL or PCL,
most like you're, you're gonna need surgery,
especially if you ever want to go back to sports at all,
because if you don't do it,
your knee is going to feel unstable, you know?
And, and you're gonna feel like your knee shifts
at time or buckles.
I had a friend who never,
I had two friends actually, that, that never repaired those.
And you know, one ended up with a knee replacement now.
I mean, cause you're, you're shifting a lot.
So it's putting a lot of stress on the
inside of the knee.
Now-
- Well, I want to make one thing clear,
because we're talking about,
you may say, oh, you've got a tear
in one of your ligaments,
but is it a complete tear rupture
or is it just a partial tear,
and only some of the fibers are ruptured?
So that has to be, and they can tell you.
- That's absolutely a great point, Brad.
- Wow.
- I'm amazed at that.
So yeah, obviously if they're only a partial tear,
they don't have to find each other.
They're already found each other.
- It's like if these fibers are torn,
but they're still connected,
the scar tissues is gonna,
you know, come,
- Find it together.
- Yep and of course then you got to
treat it appropriately so that
- Right.
it heals properly.
- So, you know,
if you're going to go back to
jumping and landing on the knee,
accelerating and changing directions, you know,
rapidly pivoting on your knee,
which is most sports.
- Right.
- Um, you're gonna need to have the,
probably the repair of the ACL or PCL.
Now,
- Usually it's the ACL. PCL is rarely torn.
- Yeah, I haven't even treated one, to be honest
with you.
- I think I had one.
- Did you?
- Yeah, but yeah, it's rare.
- So if you opt out of the surgery,
you could try a knee brace, um,
you do some physical therapy to try to help
strengthen the knee as much as possible.
Um, if you decide on the surgery,
understand it's pretty involved.
They actually take a donor site from your body
or from a cadaver and or from a hamstring.
- Right.
- But it's, it's pretty complicated,
and the rehab is quite involved.
- Yeah, it's months.
- Yeah.
- It's going to take months before you can
get back to your activity. Um,
- So I mean, you can always have the surgery,
you know, you just don't want to
not have the surgery
and then damage some cartilage
because there's so much shifting in the,
in the bone.
This is where you need to talk to your surgeon.
You know, have a forthright conversation
and figure out what is best for you.
And you know, the braces do help to some extent too,
but they can protect your knee.
- And it's probably going to be not your standard,
off-the-shelf brace that you can buy,
- Oh, it's gonna be one of those really pricey braces.
- Where they custom fit to your, to your leg
and you know, maybe thousand dollars easily.
- And fairly big too.
- Yeah.
- I mean, it's not little brace.
It's, in order to brace,
it goes fairly far up the thigh.
- Yeah, they make them pretty light though.
- Really?
- The expensive ones are like a carbon fiber
or they're, they're nice,
but those are the expensive custom ones.
There's a whole topic on braces and
how effective they are too.
I don't know if we want to get into that.
- It's amazing how, you know,
the knee is, it's a real problem.
(Brad laughing)
- And that's why, you know,
I always work out with my son.
If he had an ACL tear or somebody had an ACL tear,
it's just like, to me,
it's like one of the worst sentences you can receive.
(Brad laughing)
- So, all right, Brad,
if you want to check out the rest of this series,
by the way, a series on knee pain,
go to bobandbrad.com.
Go to the programs section
and look for knees.
And we got like,
I don't even know how many videos we got yet.
- You never know how many we,
- 30 or 40.
- It's gonna be about 30 or 40.
You're not going to look at all of them.
I mean, you may,
but you just look through the titles of each one.
The titles will let you know,
if that's the one you want to watch, watch it.
And there is a PDF button you can click on
and print out a nice PDF of the review
of the whole video, exercises,
et cetera, usually one to two pages.
And then you have that. So you don't have to go back
and review the video.
- And you better pull your wallet out
and then put it right back
because we don't charge you for this. Yeah.
- You don't even have to put in your email,
which is a deal.
- Totally frictionless.
- Frictionless. Exactly, Bob.
- All right.
- We've been talking about eggs lately.
- Be careful,
- Be careful is right.
- I like your line.
(outro music)