A Lesson I Hope You Don’t Take Away From My Book

Sometimes I worry that people might take the wrong lessons from my story of overcoming knee pain.

For example, in the book, I discuss my travails with doctors. My experience taught me that doctors are only human, that they sometimes get things wrong, and that you shouldn’t depend entirely on them to pull you through knee pain.

In short, you need to get involved in your own recovery.

I can see though how someone could read about my experience and conclude, “Doctors aren’t that important; you’ll have more success treating your knee pain yourself and not relying on a doctor, who perhaps believes the wrong things anyway.”

I know I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: Someone with knee pain should always start by seeing a good doctor and listening carefully to what that person advises.

This article that I read recently drove home why that’s so important.

The woman was a 28-year-old nurse who started having pain in her knee. She figured it was a torn meniscus. For a torn meniscus, often surgery isn’t advised, and someone does as well by undertaking a smart program of physical therapy.

She could’ve designed her own recovery program. But first, she went in for an MRI to confirm her suspicions.

It turned out that it wasn’t a torn meniscus. The imaging test found a tumor in her leg that was bigger than a peach. She had osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer.

I’ll bet she was stunned. There’s quite a big difference between “torn meniscus” and “bone cancer.”

But had she accepted her own diagnosis, and simply Googled around for a while and found some good exercises for a damaged meniscus, she could’ve delayed her cancer treatment by valuable days.

So if you have knee pain, seeing a doctor should be step one. You might diagnose yourself correctly. But if you don’t, the consequences can be life-threatening.