Fishing in the comment section ...
Richard, thank you so much for your book which I have just come across. Your symptoms and journey are very similar to mine and I have switched from treating my knee pain as a muscular-skeletal imbalance to treating it as a chronic cartilage injury.
I work very long hours at a desk and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the ideal sitting position that allows the knee cartilage to heal. In your book, you mention that you spent a lot of time sitting on the floor. I am giving this a go - legs straight out in front with my knees slightly supported at the back with a pillow so that they aren't over-extended. But as you rightly point out, modern offices aren't set up this way! And there doesn't seem to be anything online about how to work long periods at a floor desk - there aren't even any floor desks.
I exercised my editorial prerogative and cleaned up a few small spelling errors in the above, so as not to detract from the main message: how do you sit at work with a pair of knees that ache and burn when bent?
There probably is no great solution here (well, the best solution is not to have to sit at a desk for eight or nine hours a day, but I realize, most of us don't have the luxury of walking away from our white-collar jobs).
So the first thing I would warn about: Be careful about contraptions that you rig to help alleviate your knee pain. Make sure they don't put a strain elsewhere on your body. I wrote about my underdesk sling that I thought was fairly clever ... until I developed back pain that just wouldn't seem to go away.
Don't trade one problem for another.
The idea of a "floor desk" is interesting, but then: what's your "floor chair" look like? If it's not properly designed, then once again, you could wind up with back pain.
What I would think about trying, if I had it all to do over: an underdesk "pedal exerciser" that I could pedal occasionally, to give my knees very light movement. I even bought one of these for use during my recovery, when my knees every so often would burn a little. It may even have been this one here.
In the end, I never used this exerciser much. The short periods of discomfort just went away, and they're all history now. But if I had more serious chronic knee pain, and I was stuck in an office, I might try it. You have to try something! Don't suffer in silence.
Anyone else with suggestions?
