Saving My Knees: How I Proved My Doctors Wrong and Beat Chronic Knee Pain by Richard Bedard
Authors: Richard Bedard
Tags: Health
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fifty, complained of painful, stiff knees.
The participants were split up. Half received no special intervention. The others attended hour-long exercise sessions, three times a week. Under close supervision, they cycled on stationary bikes, jogged on trampolines, performed knee bends with light weights. An enhanced MRI test evaluated their knees at the beginning of the trial and four months later.
The results: exercisers saw a significant increase in glycosaminoglycan content in their knee cartilage, according to a 2005 medical journal article. The findings suggest, the authors wrote, that “human cartilage responds to physiologic loading in a way similar to that exhibited by muscle and bone.” What’s more, they went on, the improvement in the tissue may explain why osteoarthritis patients report benefits from exercise.
All these studies were eye-opening and exhilarating for me. For months, I had felt as if I was in the fight of my life with one arm tied behind my back. My doctors kept insisting I couldn’t get better. They were the experts. They went through medical school, served grueling residencies in their specialty, examined hundreds of problem knees every year.
Their pessimism left me wrestling with self-doubt. My family rallied to support me, but behind their expressions of sympathy, I sensed their doubt too. They assumed that the medical professionals must be right. To them, I was like the terminal cancer patient who stubbornly refuses to believe half a dozen doctors who make the same diagnosis.
Now I possessed evidence that exercise could improve the quality of cartilage. But what about the quantity? Does damaged tissue ever thicken on its own? Or does cartilage that is blistered, or pocked by a shallow hole or deep hole, just continue to wear away? The question has wide relevance beyond problem knees. A 2005 study found that three-fifths of healthy, middle-aged adults had defective cartilage on the inner half of their dominant knee alone.
My doctors gave me the impression that bad cartilage recovered rarely if ever. Fortunately, in 2000, researchers in the Australian state of Tasmania decided to look at how defects in the tissue changed over time. In all, 325 subjects completed a two-year study. An MRI exam was used to grade the quality of the cartilage at various locations in their knee joints.
The scoring system went like this: Zero represented normal, while four stood for the other extreme, worn to the bone. The other grades accounted for intermediate levels of cartilage damage and loss: one (blistering), two (irregularities and less than fifty percent loss of thickness), three (deep ulceration with at least half the tissue gone).
So for example, a subject might start out with good cartilage at a certain location, say under the patella. It would be scored a “zero.” Two years later, if almost half the tissue was found to be gone, it would be downgraded to a “two.” I expected to find evidence of good cartilage going bad. The more tantalizing question was, did bad cartilage ever become good—or at least better?
Surprisingly it did, and with an astounding frequency. The figures appeared in a March 2006 edition of Archives of Internal Medicine , in an article bearing the rather clunky title, “Natural History of Knee Cartilage Defects and Factors Affecting Change.”
A full thirty-seven percent of the subjects had a cartilage defect improve in one of their knee compartments! That even exceeded the thirty-three percent that were found to have a worsening somewhere. The report included an MRI image showing a case of clear thickening. A sizable hole had filled in, going from a “three” to a “one.” The researchers wrote, “The decrease in cartilage defects may represent cartilage repair and healing.”
Intrigued, I scanned the top of the article to learn more about the subject population. If perfectly healthy, perhaps these people just healed better. But it turned out that one-third
The participants were split up. Half received no special intervention. The others attended hour-long exercise sessions, three times a week. Under close supervision, they cycled on stationary bikes, jogged on trampolines, performed knee bends with light weights. An enhanced MRI test evaluated their knees at the beginning of the trial and four months later.
The results: exercisers saw a significant increase in glycosaminoglycan content in their knee cartilage, according to a 2005 medical journal article. The findings suggest, the authors wrote, that “human cartilage responds to physiologic loading in a way similar to that exhibited by muscle and bone.” What’s more, they went on, the improvement in the tissue may explain why osteoarthritis patients report benefits from exercise.
All these studies were eye-opening and exhilarating for me. For months, I had felt as if I was in the fight of my life with one arm tied behind my back. My doctors kept insisting I couldn’t get better. They were the experts. They went through medical school, served grueling residencies in their specialty, examined hundreds of problem knees every year.
Their pessimism left me wrestling with self-doubt. My family rallied to support me, but behind their expressions of sympathy, I sensed their doubt too. They assumed that the medical professionals must be right. To them, I was like the terminal cancer patient who stubbornly refuses to believe half a dozen doctors who make the same diagnosis.
Now I possessed evidence that exercise could improve the quality of cartilage. But what about the quantity? Does damaged tissue ever thicken on its own? Or does cartilage that is blistered, or pocked by a shallow hole or deep hole, just continue to wear away? The question has wide relevance beyond problem knees. A 2005 study found that three-fifths of healthy, middle-aged adults had defective cartilage on the inner half of their dominant knee alone.
My doctors gave me the impression that bad cartilage recovered rarely if ever. Fortunately, in 2000, researchers in the Australian state of Tasmania decided to look at how defects in the tissue changed over time. In all, 325 subjects completed a two-year study. An MRI exam was used to grade the quality of the cartilage at various locations in their knee joints.
The scoring system went like this: Zero represented normal, while four stood for the other extreme, worn to the bone. The other grades accounted for intermediate levels of cartilage damage and loss: one (blistering), two (irregularities and less than fifty percent loss of thickness), three (deep ulceration with at least half the tissue gone).
So for example, a subject might start out with good cartilage at a certain location, say under the patella. It would be scored a “zero.” Two years later, if almost half the tissue was found to be gone, it would be downgraded to a “two.” I expected to find evidence of good cartilage going bad. The more tantalizing question was, did bad cartilage ever become good—or at least better?
Surprisingly it did, and with an astounding frequency. The figures appeared in a March 2006 edition of Archives of Internal Medicine , in an article bearing the rather clunky title, “Natural History of Knee Cartilage Defects and Factors Affecting Change.”
A full thirty-seven percent of the subjects had a cartilage defect improve in one of their knee compartments! That even exceeded the thirty-three percent that were found to have a worsening somewhere. The report included an MRI image showing a case of clear thickening. A sizable hole had filled in, going from a “three” to a “one.” The researchers wrote, “The decrease in cartilage defects may represent cartilage repair and healing.”
Intrigued, I scanned the top of the article to learn more about the subject population. If perfectly healthy, perhaps these people just healed better. But it turned out that one-third
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