Self-Manage Knee Pain
Self-Manage and Self-Treat Your Knee Pain: Before (or after) Injections or Surgery.
Knee Pain
Knee pain can present significant challenges, impacting mobility, daily activities, and overall well-being. Perhaps you’ve had a failed total knee replacement surgery, or you’ve just been unhappy with knee surgery. Whether you’re dealing with acute injuries, chronic discomfort, or post-surgical rehabilitation, our goal is to help you regain mobility, reduce pain, and improve your quality of life.
Our Online Course
We have created dozens of video demonstrations of exercises and strategies that we’ve used across hundreds of clients. This content is evidence-based and current. You are given clear instructions to guide you through a potentially life-changing experience.
Get a FREE copy of the book, Self-Manage Knee Pain, when you buy the course!
Our Book
Our book, now available on Amazon, helps you recover from knee pain before considering injections or surgery. It is based on clinical experience and success from treating hundreds of patients successfully.
Self-Manage Knee Pain
When knee pain disrupts your daily activities and hinders your quality of life, finding effective and safe solutions becomes paramount. Invasive treatments like steroids, injections, and surgery come with great costs and risks.
“Self-Manage Knee Pain” is backed by extensive research and worldwide guidelines on conservative knee pain care. Reduce your reliance on strong medications with harmful side effects. Prevent strength and muscle mass loss due to decreased activity caused by knee pain. Maintain a healthy weight.
Discover how to take control of your knee pain and regain a pain-free life with our evidence-based and practical approaches.
5 “tips” from the Self-Manage Knee Pain book
1. Exhaust conservative options
Exhaust all conservative options before considering surgery due to many potential
complications. Knowing the possible choices puts you in a better position to potentially avoid knee surgery, minimize complications, shorten your recovery time, save money, and do what you feel is the very best for you.
2. Imaging evidence isn’t perfect
Understand that your knee X-ray or MRI is not the final answer to eliminating or conservatively managing your pain and improving function. Imaging evidence alone is not an indicator of your best treatment or management choice.
3. Avoid injections, if possible
Research steroid injections before allowing a specialist to inject your knee. A New England Journal of medicine study comparing steroid injections and P. T. found that after one year the P. T. clients experienced lower pain and higher function while other reports found long term joint damage potential using steroids.
4. Limit medication dependence
Develop self-management skills to eliminate or reduce dependence on medications since risk of gastrointestinal ulcers or bleeding increases the longer you use them. In 2015, the Federal Drug Administration issued strong warnings about heart attack and stroke risks for commonly used over-the-counter drugs advertised daily on TV.
5. Movement is your medicine
Seek alternatives for pain or anti- inflammatory medications, making movement your medicine. You may be among the many who are first learning about the severe side effects of common or stronger anti-inflammatory medication.
Endorsement
Ron Clinton has pooled his over 4 decades of clinical practice with his education and the science of rehabilitative medicine to offer consumers with a truly practical and comprehensive document on knee pain. More importantly and specifically, the “52 Tips to Self Manage Knee Pain” is written in a manner for all to consume – and apply – with ease. Consumers of this booklet may range from experienced clinicians, hoping to improve their educational points, to patients with knee pain themselves. This manuscript informs the reader and respectfully considers all angles of “why”: more function, higher quality of life, less risk, and lower expense. Readers benefit in two additional, unexpected ways through this resource. The first is the many misconceptions and myths that are clearly debunked – providing all of us with the “what to do”, but also unveiling what is hype and unproven. The second is that these 52 tips are about knee pain, yet persons with back pain, facing surgical recommendations, can also benefit from more than half of the applications found within.
As a Fellow of the American Physical Therapy Association, internationally-invited speaker, author, practice owner and clinician for more than three decades myself – my patients and colleagues will benefit from Mr. Clinton’s work for years to come!
-Mike Studer, PT, DPT, MHS, NCS, CEEAA, CWT, CSST, FAPTA
Need Help With Knee Pain?
No matter what your needs are, we’re here to help you get back to your normal activities and live a pain-free life. Contact us today to schedule a consultation and take the first step towards a healthier, happier you!
Our Course
Self-Manage Knee Pain
In this comprehensive course (based on the booklet: Self-managed Knee Pain: Tips, Strategies and Exercises Before Injections or Surgery), you are provided with 8 different sections, 17 different modules and more than four and a half hours of content.
Included are many video demonstrations of exercises and strategies that have worked very well for many of my clients as well as hundreds of other clients who are treated with the directional preference assessment and treatment approach.
The content provided is evidence-based and current. You are given clear instructions to guide you through a potentially life-changing experience.
Some knee pain providers want you to start with more expensive programs that have little evidence to support them. Other providers want to do invasive techniques (shots/surgery) before trying conservative methods as taught in this course.
Here are the Objectives for Each Module of the Course.
Module 1
A. Understand the knee pain vicious cycle.
B. Realize that knee pain not resolved quickly triggers a series of unfavorable events.
C. Learn why less steps per day, weight gain, more need for medication, loss of strength and inflammation lead to more of the same.
Module 2
A. Learn why worldwide research and treatment guidelines support learning self-management skills to manage chronic knee pain.
B. Learn how this builds confidence to manage your pain and not be managed by it.
Module 3
A. Learn why imaging tests (x-rays and MRIs) are a picture in time and should only be a part of the decision making process regarding your knee treatment.
B. Learn why you need to understand the role of inflammation in knee pain.
Module 4
A. Learn the stunning limitations and risks associated with over-the-counter medications, opioids, injections and surgery.
Module 5
A. Learn additional helpful information to self-manage and control inflammation.
B. Learn about research regarding the best diets to reduce inflammation or aggravation of the knee.
Module 6
A. Learn strategies to break the vicious cycle of unfavorable events caused by knee pain.
Module 7
A. Learn easy to implement self-management interventions.
B. Identify the importance of self-management. This module provides practical examples and suggestions.
Module 8
A. Learn lifestyle modification and principles for managing daily activities and protecting the knee.
B. Learn simple changes you can make to lesson pain and increase function.
Module 9.
A. Learn how professional guidance and consultation can enhance your ability to self-manage knee pain.
B. Learn how to choose the most conservative, cost-effective and evidence-based program.
Module 10
A. Learn why your knee pain may not be a knee problem.
B. Learn how to do self-assessment to determine if the spine could be involved with your knee pain and decreased function.
C. Learn the possibilities for improvement from actual case studies.
Module 11
A. Learn how to self-assess your knee and determine if you have a directional preference of movement.
B. Learn specific directional preference exercises.
Module 12
A. Learn why exercise for the knee or spine is like a medication. Learn the importance of dose frequency and timing, et cetera.
B. Learn why every self-treatment program will be an individual program with a combination of exercise, daily activity modification, and specific self-management strategies.
C. Learn exercise guidelines.
Module 13
A. Learn key lower extremity strengthening exercises-an important factor in determining long-term success.
B. Learn hip exercises that are helpful for knee issues.
Module 14
A. Learn guidelines for strategic and safe walking without flaring up your knee.
B. Learn how to deal with limping or slowed down walking secondary to knee pain.
Module 15
A. Learn how a stress-reducing exercise can be an important piece of your holistic plan to self-manage pain in the knee and other areas of the body.
B. Identify if running can or should be on your list of exercises.
Module 16
A. Learn how professional guidance from a physical therapist, in conjunction with self-management strategies learned in this course, can help you achieve another level of success.
B. Exhaust all conservative strategies before letting any practitioner stick needles, scopes or blades into your knee.
Module 17
A. Identify and outline your unique, personal “(jigsaw puzzle”) plan based on the self-assessment and guidelines presented in this course.
B. Use the “Afformation” approach to document your plan.
C. Refer to your plan and carry out your plan on a daily basis.
D. Stick with your plan and seek consultation with a physical therapist if needed.