In this video, we're going to start talking about damage to the meniscus. Now, as we mentioned in the video about anatomy, which is important to go back and watch, if you haven't already watched that video, you have two meniscus or mini sky in each knee. There's a medial one on the inside of your knee and a lateral one on the outside of your knee. They're shaped like horseshoes, and they have two main functions. One is to absorb the shock as you run, jump or even walk. And the other function is to spread out the pressure that the round shape of the femur puts on a flat shape of the tibia.

Damage to the meniscus can happen usually in two ways. One of them is an acute injury, and the other one is a chronic injury. acute injury are usually sports injuries. These happen with a twisting motion of the knee most of the time. This can happen when you're playing sports like basketball or volleyball or something skiing. skiing is a very, very common sport to have some type of injury with a twisting motion to your knee, what will happen is there will be a complete or partial tear of this material.

Now, this is problematic because the meniscus doesn't have a very good blood supply, and you need a good blood supply in order to repair some of the some of the tissues in your body. But because the meniscus doesn't have a very good blood supply, it doesn't heal very well. Now, normally, a tear wouldn't hurt that much, but it might cause damage in a few ways. If there's a piece of the meniscus that flaps around, it might cause damage leading to inflammation. And this can cause you a lot of pain. Alternatively, if it moves out of its place, it won't be doing its job as the shock absorber or as the or is the thing that spreads the pressure out on the tibia.

And this can also cause pressure in one point and this can cause damage to the cartilage. Another problem that we already He mentioned this damage or this type of injury will usually show itself. First with initial inflammation after the after the injury itself, the knee might be swollen in turn red, and after that resolves, you will have a remaining pain. Now this pain will be first it will have a specific place to it usually either on the inside or the outside of the knee according to where the meniscus and what's injured. And it will also cause continuous pain. Depending on where the injury is, it might show itself in different ways.

For example, if you squat down very low, bend your knees until the end, this might cause extreme pain. But Alternatively, you might even have pain as you're walking generally on a flat surface. Alright, now we've talked about the acute meniscus injury. Let's talk about the chronic injury. A chronic meniscus injury usually happens with age. Chronic, as we mentioned, is an injury that happens in remains for a number of months.

Now, this is might be because the type of tissue the type of cartilage or fibrous tissue that makes up the meniscus gets weaker over time and get a little bit more flexible might lose its place. This can cause fitting of that type of tissue and the cartilage moves closer one to another. When this cartilage presses one against another in a specific spot, it can also cause pain and injury. Now that we talked a little bit about the acute and chronic injury of the meniscus, we're going to talk about two specific treatments in the next video.