Update on "Saving My Knees," the Book

I realize there are a certain number of you out there finding this blog for the first time, feeling that you've dropped in during the middle of a conversation.

Nothing wrong with that. That's what a good blog should aspire to being: a lively conversation.

However, I imagine you first-time readers may be wondering: What is this book, Saving My Knees? Is it worth my time to buy, especially if I don't have a Kindle already?

Saving My Knees is my story of beating chronic knee pain and how I discovered much of what I was told to do, as a patient, was demonstrably, provably WRONG or MISGUIDED. The book is an argument (for a certain approach to overcoming knee pain). The book is a refutation (I hope) of the standard treatment regimen for chondromalacia/patellofemoral pain syndrome.

It has been on sale through Amazon.com for more than a month and has done better than I expected. What's more, a handful of copies have gone to buyers abroad, which really makes me happy, as it shows that the dissemination of my message isn't being constrained by geographical borders.

So who am I anyway? Not a doctor. Not a physical therapist. But I am a longtime journalist, a fairly bright guy, an analytical thinker with the ability to synthesize knowledge, and someone who is open-minded enough to know that the experts aren't always right ...

If you are a smart, discriminating person, willing to question authority when appropriate (I slavishly followed the advice of my physical therapists and doctors until I realized their advice didn't make sense), and you have knee pain, you should read this book. I don't mean to sound arrogant with the preceding characterization -- it's just that I've spent a lot of time lately on knee pain message boards. And I know there is a certain kind of person my book won't reach. Even though physical therapy has failed, that person has either jumped on the surgery merry-go-round (and once you're on that carousel, you often stay on it, I'm afraid) or can't quite wrap their head around the idea that current medical practices could be wrong.

These are the same kind of people who, 200 years ago, were being bled into bleeding bowls to cure problems such as acne and who weren't questioning why their acne wasn't getting better. (A colorful analogy I like to trot out from time to time -- medical science at any given moment in time will be imperfect; that's simply reality!)

I wrote Saving My Knees because there are NO OTHER books anywhere written in the first-person that chronicle how someone triumphed over knee pain after being told his knees would never get better. I wrote it because I followed a rigorous, fact-based approach to healing that I knew would be relevant for other knee pain sufferers. I wrote it because, selfishly, I wanted to plant a flag, on January 2011 (the publication date), showing that I was in the early vanguard of people who figured this out years before everyone else does.

Yes, I'm pretty confident that a lot of the thinking about knee pain treatment is going to evolve significantly over the next two or three decades.

So, if you're on the fence about buying Saving My Knees, you can:

Go here to read my (rather long) KneeGuru thread announcing the release of the book (and what it's about).

Go here to read my (really, really long) KneeGuru thread about my success story beating knee pain.

Go here to find out how to read an electronic book, if you don't have a Kindle (hint: it's easy).

And if you want to just hang out at this blog for a while, making up your mind, that's fine too ;).