Will You Ever Be Able to Return to Your Favorite Sport Someday?

I found this in the comment section. I’m pulling it out because one of these questions in particular is worth addressing:

Do you think I will be able to play football again? It gave me purpose and a social circle. I am desperate to play again. I understand it is a long recovery process, and I am willing to be completely disciplined and dedicated to that. Whilst in recovery, would you recommend wearing knee braces? My last question: out of the three books recommended in 'Saving My Knees,' which are: Scott Dye's Envelope of function, The Doug Kelsey book and 'There Is A Cure For Arthritis', is it important I buy all of them? And which book should I read first?

Okay, the easy stuff first:

Wear knee braces or not?

I’m somewhat skeptical. The ones that probably do make a difference in terms of knee support are expensive and make you look like a cyborg. The ones you can buy at Walmart (or even some high-end stores) aren’t doing anything to reduce the load on your knees.

However ... as always, your mileage may vary. You may get a placebo effect. Or, as I mention in this post, there could be a different beneficial effect. Neoprene sleeves are thought to help by aiding proprioception. That big word describes your body’s sense of how it’s positioned in space. Better proprioception might mean better balance, which could improve knee stability.

Which books to buy?

Scott Dye has no book on envelope of function that I know of. However, you can probably find some of his papers online. Still, I wouldn’t even bother chasing down one of those. You’ll get an adequate sense of envelope of function by searching this blog or from Doug Kelsey’s “90 Day Knee Arthritis Remedy” at Doug’s website.

Will I be able to play football again?

This is the question I wanted to address.

The answer is a definite maybe. That’s the best anyone can tell you. Anyone who says otherwise is probably a charlatan or a fool.

I wanted to pull out this question because many active people ask it. They want to know, “Will I ever be able to dance/bicycle/rock climb/whatever again?” For me, it was ride my bicycle, of course.

I tried hard to get back on that bike as soon as I could. I got back on the bike before my knees were ready. I tried biking, failed, tried biking, failed.

To get better, I think you have to move beyond that question of “Will I ever be able to participate in my favorite sport/activity again?” You have to accept that the answer might be “no.” You have to look for new physical activities that won’t stress your knees that you can do in the interim.

I gave up on biking for a while, after even easy cycling disturbed my knee joints. So I decided not to even think about it. Pushed it out of my mind. I told myself I could be happy just being able to go for long walks. Once I made my peace with that, I no longer was focused on, “When will I be able to get back on my bike?”

Before then, I had been rather obsessive about cycling. But sometimes you have be prepared to move on. I did, and then when I got better, many months later, I rolled the bike out of the driveway, took a deep breath, climbed on the saddle, and slowly off I went.

So maybe you can play football again (which I assume is what we Americans would call soccer). But for now, you might want to think about pushing that thought far out of your mind. That tends to make things easier during what can be a long recovery.

A Cautionary Tale From the Big Medical Business of Knee Pain

Knee pain is a big, big business, not surprisingly.

Here’s an alert from Seeking Alpha, a website covering news on publicly traded companies, that shows starkly what small companies have at stake with cartilage restoration technologies.

In this case, Histogenics apparently developed a treatment called NeoCart. It’s described as a “cell-therapy based implant designed to help restore and heal knee cartilage through the use of a patient's own cells.”

I’ve written here and here about autologous chondrocyte implantation. I’m not sure how NeoCart works exactly, but it sounds a lot like ACI.

Alas, the NeoCart story may have a sour ending. I’ve been skeptical about ACI; I’m doubtful that it will lead to a result better than an old-fashioned microfracture. And sure enough, here are the findings of a study that sent the shares of Histogenics into a nosedive:

NeoCart, when compared to microfracture, was unable to demonstrate a statistically significant improvement in function and pain.

When the news came out, back in September, the stock abruptly plunged more than 75%, to about 60 cents a share. Think of that. If you had invested $100,000 in this company, overnight you wound up with less than $25,000.

Back in September, the CEO of the company hastened to assure investors that the results weren’t as bad as they looked.

If you believed that, if you held on to your stock, thinking “It’s going to rebound now” – and investor psychology shows people do tend to cling to their losers, hoping they’ll recover at least somewhat – you’re in even worse shape now.

Its latest stock price is 11 cents, or about one-fifth of its value in September. Right now it’s trading in the basement of the penny stock dungeon, jerking up and down on vapors and wisps of news.

What’s the upshot here?

Well, if you’ve got money to blow out your, um, ears, you should realize that investing in small companies whose fortunes are riding on unproven medical technologies is always going to be high risk. So caveat investor.

But for me, it’s at least as significant to ponder that maybe surgeons like Scott Dye have it right when they espouse a belief in doing as little surgically to heal bad knees as possible. If you can mend your bad knees without any kind of surgery, so much the better.

But if you’re going to do something to restore lost cartilage, maybe the simpler, less-invasive microfracture, which aims to stimulate your body to heal itself, beats this fancy, complex technology where your cartilage cells are grown in a lab then sutured back into your joints.

Something to ponder.