April, 2020
NEWSLETTER
NEED SOME KNEE RELIEF?
Whether you have knee pain or have been suffering for a long time, seeing a physical therapist at Appalachian Physical Therapy, Inc. can help you return to a more active and pain-free life. Give us a call at: • Broadway: 540-901-9501 • Harrisonburg: 540-209-8977 • Pinehurst: 910-215-0541 knee strength. Soon we are standing and walking upright and pretty soon we are off and running. Ask any parent who has had a child how quickly a little one can get away from you. Realizing we use our legs to get around, it is not uncommon to experience some pain or difficulty with overuse or an injury. It can be as simple as stepping on an uneven piece of concrete walking down the street. Maybe we miss the rung on a ladder or heaven forbid, fall off the ladder! Those are pretty obvious injuries and come in all complexities. A muscle strain can cause swelling or difficulty with moving or walking. Spraining a ligament can occur which will usually give you a puffy joint with the inability to move or weight bear properly. Here it gets a little complicated as you can also damage or tear your meniscus or cartilage disc in-between the two bones. There are certainly more ways to damage or injure your knee but you get the point.
Knees. We have two of them. That is not an excuse to over use them. At the same time, they need to be used or you will have problems with them. Knees are weight bearing joints that have cartilage discs in-between the major bones, the femur and tibia that take the vast majority of the weight passed through the leg. We have the knee cap or patella that slides over the surface of the femur giving us some leverage we would not ordinarily have without it. The knee is primarily a hinge joint with the ability to have a small amount of rotation which can lock the joint into extension. Powerful ligaments help to guide motion allowing for smooth motion from full extension or completely straight to full flexion where the tibia and femur almost double up on one another. Usually this works out just fine until we take into consideration the amount of stress placed through this joint on all surfaces and activities we encounter. Our legs are very powerful and due, in part, from the boney structure, as well as the massive muscles that make up the soft tissue surrounding those bones. We start developing all of these structures the moment we are born. We learn how to push with our legs to help us roll over and crawl to develop our hip and
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