Yes, You Can Avoid Knee Surgery. Read About it in the Washington Post!

The Washington Post ran a wonderful article a couple of weeks ago about alternatives to knee surgery.

I was flattered that the reporter, Sally Squires, saw fit to include a condensed version of my story. We talked a couple of times. As a journalist myself, I know that good reporters conduct a lot of interviews, and not everyone they speak with makes the final cut.

When interviewing me, Squires was quite careful and thorough. As she explained in the article, she has been suffering from her own travails with knee pain, so I imagine that the research she did had a special resonance.

She gives a great overview of the dimensions of the problem our country has with sore knees: one in four adults have chronic knee pain, and the number of sufferers has jumped 65% in four decades. About 680,000 total knee replacements were performed in 2014.

Can you imagine that? That’s about one in 500 Americans  – in just a single year. What’s more, when adjusted for population, that rate doubled from 1991 to 2010. As her article notes, the number of knee replacements is outpacing operations for coronary artery bypass surgery.

This country has a crisis of bad knees, it seems.

Squires also quotes someone about the delayed onset of symptoms with knee pain. This is critically important, and I don’t remember reading much if anything about this when I undertook my own journey to save my knees.

It means that the activity you do now may seem pain free, but your knees might protest hours later. And if you don’t connect the dots between pain now and something dumb you did yesterday, your knees may never get better because you’ll never try to modify your behavior! I talk about this at some length in my book; it was a key revelation for me.

Finally, one small thing: she did mention that I still notice some burning in my knees when sitting. Honestly, I did suffer occasional spells of burning in my knees (when sitting) during the “post-recovery” period after I healed enough to go back to work.

But the problem with burning under my kneecaps lessened over time. I haven’t had any issues for (I think) two years now. I have to put “I think” in parentheses simply because it’s been a while, and I no longer track every little sensation from my knee joints.

But she’s correct that I did have this problem, and it took a while to shake. And it’s not like my knees never complain. I really beat them up sometimes (like in a very intense Thanksgiving bicycle ride this week). I still like to play hard.

And I’m glad that I can again!

If you haven’t read the excellent article that Squires wrote, please check it out here.