That “I’m Just Getting Old” Misconception About Knee Pain

As many of you know, I have Google scrape the web daily for news about knee pain. Recently the search turned up a column from the Flathead Beacon, a newspaper out of northern Montana. There are two huge national forests there; it looks like a beautiful place to live.

The writer is a devoted outdoorsman worried about how many more bird-hunting expeditions he has left in his failing knees. “I have become increasingly aware that there’s a hunting life expectancy in this body of mine,” he laments.

He had surgery on the right knee after a marathon quail hunt about 15 years ago. Then the second knee started going downhill, and what can you do? Here’s the money paragraph that had me ready to slap my palm against my forehead:

When knee No. 2 went south this spring, my doctor speculated that I just had joints built in a way that eventually wore out that knee cartilage. Like the right knee, the left seemed to just fail over time. It started aching last spring, after a casual jog with my daughter. It was fine the day of the run, but I couldn’t walk the following morning.

First, I’d get a new doctor. Yes, aging does have an effect on our bodies; that’s undeniable. But properly cared for knees don’t have to wear out over time. More typically, they fall apart because of benign or not-so-benign neglect.

Notice that the left “start aching last spring, after a casual jog.” I don’t know what happened, but a picture comes to mind, of someone attempting a little exercise after a relatively inactive winter and too many holiday treats consumed.

Of course the knee probably wouldn’t hurt during the run; that’s the problem with cartilage. But the next day – oh yeah – you’d feel it, full force. And if it was occasionally unhappy before, that casual trot could be the tipping event that pushes you into the land of chronic misery.

To be fair, the writer seems to understand the crux of the problem:

But the 10 to 20 pounds I’ve been trying to lose since, well, forever, that’s no longer a matter of just trying to look good.

If you’re carrying an extra 20 pounds (most men who say they want to lose 10 to 20 actually need to lose more like 20 to 30), you’re begging for knee trouble. If you do everything right, your knees may be fine. But you’re at risk if you lurch between sedentary and active states. What you need to do is obvious, though hard: Lose weight. That’s one piece of advice no one would dispute.