- [Singer] Bob and Brad,
the two most famous
physical therapists
on the internet.
- Hi folks, I'm Bob sharp,
physical therapist.
- Fred Heineck, physical therapist.
- And together we are
the most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our opinion of course Bob.
- How can I say that with a serious face.
Today we're going to talk about
the six big lies about
knee pain, - Six.
- knee arthritis and knee surgery.
- That's a pretty strong accusation, six big lies.
- All right, - Let's find out.
- Let's get right into it.
Knee pain can occur at any age.
You can have sports injuries and falls.
But as we age, pain begins to emerge for a lot of people.
I saw one statistics where it was 10% of people
age 40 to 50,
by the time you're 70
it's 25%.
And I actually think that's low
because the amount of people - Yeah.
I know with knee pain in my age group,
which is the 60s is really quite high.
- Well, a lot of people just don't talk about it.
- That's true. Or they don't go in to a doctor.
- Right.
- And that's my friends, they go to me.
(laughing)
- All right. So the typical scenario
that we see is, you're going to have
a 50 year old or a 70 year old.
They start to have some knee pain,
they go in to see their doctor,
and it's not going away.
So the doctor orders some type of imaging test.
- Sure.
- Maybe a knee x-ray or maybe eventually an MRI.
And they're going to find something
I'm going to tell you right now,
they will find something because all of our knees are
starting to wear out there's that wear and tear.
And the patient takes that that wear and tear
might be causing their pain.
It might be, there's a good chance it may not be
What we have found is that they have done
many, many studies on this,
and it's kind of the popular topic right now Brad,
is that they'll do imaging tests on a non-painful knee
and the painful knee and they'll look,
sometimes the painful knee will look better
than the non-painful knee.
- I've had a number of patients come in and they say,
this knee hurts, but on the x-rays, this one looks worse.
- Yes.
- You know? And so it's like,
which knee do you get replaced?
- Right. (laughing)
- So we tend to go by pain, pain levels.
And also in addition to that,
we try to do things that reduce the pain,
but we don't assume that just because you're bone on bone,
you're going to have pain or it won't get better.
It may get better. So let's-
- Or at least you can curb it from getting worse, hopefully.
And it all depends.
Everyone's a little different.
- Yeah. So we're going to look at, you know,
daily habits and stressors that are happening to your knee.
And we're going to see if that improves
when we changed those.
So, alright, next myth that we hear is
my knee arthritis is
going to continue to degenerate.
And my pain's going to get worse
because I mean, I have arthritis,
it's not going to get any better.
- Sure, right Bob.
- Not necessarily true.
So they've done several studies
that your pain may remain the same,
or it may even get a little bit better.
So my wife is a good example of this,
about three years ago,
she had a severe episode of
knee pain to the point where
we had her on crutches.
We were all worried
because we're going on a trip to Seattle
and we thought, oh my God, she won't be able to do anything.
She will sit in the car while I go hike.
(laughing)
But,
it flared up her knee.
To this day now she's back running.
She has no knee pain.
- So what did she do?
Or are we gonna talk about that later?
- We're going to talk about that
in other knee videos,
I mean. - Oh wow okay,
I just, I understand.
- The myth says, you know that,
- Right, yeah.
- You're not doomed to a life of knee pain
just because you have a flare up.
So, all right, a lot of patients,
I hear Brad say this,
I wore out my knee because
I did a lot of milking or I did a
lot of running or I did a lot of hiking.
Milking a cow.
- Farmers.
- Farmers. (laughing)
- I did a lot of roofing
and they feel like I did this to my
knee and it's not going to, you know, I'm
doomed again to have knee pain.
And that's, couldn't be the furthest from the truth
because we found that active people
tend to have better knees than sedentary people.
So don't believe that
just because you had an active lifestyle
that you're going to have knee pain and
that you can't get rid of it.
Number four,
I don't want to make my arthritis worse
so I'm going to rest my knee.
- Ah, Yes.
- I got a lot of the elderly people
that have said that
and I think they just didn't want to work.
You know, I've been working my whole life,
I don't want to work now.
- Which, you know, you've got to respect that
to a certain degree but,
if you keep a joint idle.
A painful, arthritic joint.
It needs movement doesn't mean
you're going to go out and lift weights or
crawl around on your hands and knees for movement.
You have to do appropriate movement.
- Movement that's under control
and that doesn't increase your pain.
Joints love movement.
It actually increases your synovial fluid,
which is kind of the oil of the knee.
So the only thing that Brad and I would say,
I think is that,
knee pain or knee arthritis can get so
advanced that even movement is bad for it.
- Right, yeah.
- I've seen some knees like that where it's,
you know just creeks like crazy.
- Yeah. You can literally hear it and feel it.
That's beyond hope.
- And that doesn't happen very often.
Happened to my grandpa because
he let his knees go and
he never would have surgery on him.
And it got to the point where
they were pretty much fused almost by then so.
Another lie we hear, it's not really a lie,
just a statement.
My mom had arthritis,
and she suffered from it for years,
so I'm going to get arthritis.
And arthritis is inherent in some situations,
but it also is very common.
If your mom had arthritis
welcome to the club, I mean,
(laughter) if you live long enough,
I think you're going to get some form of arthritis.
Again, it's amazing how the body can
adapt to
getting better
if you allow it to heal.
- Right. So treating it properly.
And that's what we do have
on the other videos in this series
that are specific to
how to treat and how to exercise a
sore arthritic knee.
- Sorry we're not giving any answers here today,
but we're just going over the things that
people commonly say to us that are not true.
And you have to start off with the proper mindset I think.
If you're going to get a positive result.
You've got to believe it could happen. You know?
The last one I hear a lot is I'm going to eventually
need a knee replacement.
I might as well do it now.
Well, there's a lot of things to say about that.
That may be true,
especially if your knee pain is really bad
and your health is a question mark.
But if you can put it off and tolerate
or get the knee better,
why have the knee replacement now?
They last maybe what 20 years?
- That's typically what the rule of thumb that most
surgeons say.
- So if you're in your forties or fifties,
you could outlive that knee replacement pretty easy
- And putting a second one in,
is more difficult - is not fun.
At a later age. - Revisions are
not desirable.
- Right.
- But surgeons will typically try to,
they'll tell you that
maybe we should wait
if you can get it five more years out of it.
Plus technology always improves, so.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- Exactly. Who knows what they're going to come up with,
bionic type knees that will be better than
your regular knee. - Well, now I think
they're working on custom prosthesis,
- Oh are they really?
- Versus, you know,
- That fit the person.
- Right.
- Wow nice.
- All right, so speak to your doctor about it,
but you really want to trial a physical therapy before
you do hip or do knee surgery.
So, all right that's the six.
You want to check out the rest of the program on knee.
We have it at
bobandbrad.com go to the program section
we got a whole bunch of videos
on how to treat knee pain.
What else we have with it?
- Well, Bob, we have an outstanding PDF,
which is very nice printed off.
It'll show you everything we talked about here for this,
as well as all the rest of the videos, exercises included.
There is absolutely no cost to this.
It's absolutely free.
We don't even ask for an email.
It's just a gift. - No catch.
No catch to it. - Absolutely.
- All right, Be careful.
Thanks for watching.
(upbeat music)