Assess and address the root causes of pathologies
Knee pain and symptoms occur during movement when the patient is active. However, imaging and clinical tests are static. Do you believe that treating theses static images and results is the most effective way to address the patient's pain and limitations?
In fact, the static and often non-weight bearing images and clinical tests have a very low correlation with the patient's pain and symptoms.
Let's take a look at the type of patients physicians/PT may have followed:
- Patients with low grade OA experiencing high level of pain and symptoms vs patients with high grade OA experiencing low level of limitations.
- Patients with ACL tear living an active life without pain/symptoms vs patients with similar ACL injury severely limited in daily activities.
There isn’t any sensible imaging giving relevant information for patients suffering from anterior knee pain (“Anterior pain is known to have a multifactorial and nebulous pathology and lack of sensitive tests to help rule out PFPS when negative, which suggests that it may be a diagnosis of exclusion” Cook et al. 2012).
What can you do to prepare for the next visit/follow-up?
Since pain and symptoms occur during movement, guidelines urge us to assess the knee function, more specifically during gait. But this is a challenge as visual assessment is limited and lacks accuracy, precisions and sensitivity.
Stay tuned ! I’ll show you how the KneeKG helps address this need.
Michelle