In the last video, we talked about injuries to the meniscus, we talked about acute injuries, which usually happens while playing sports with some type of twisting motion of your knee. We also talked about chronic injuries, which is can sometimes have degenerative changes when the when the tissue gets a little bit weaker and can cause damage over time. In this video, we're going to mention the main treatments for meniscus injury. Now, there are two things that you can do. The first is physical therapy, and this is the most important part of the treatment. Later on in this course, we're going to show you a number of exercises that you should be doing to strengthen the supporting muscles and take pain away from that area.

Also to increase the blood supply with the physical activity and improve the healing process. As we mentioned, the meniscus doesn't have a very strong blood supply in the first place. And this blood supply is imperative to help the repair process happen then next type of treatment that we want to talk about in this video is surgery. Now, a meniscus injury surgery usually is done through arthroscopy, and this is with a small camera that's placed inside the knee joint. This is a very minimally invasive surgery, they don't open up your knee, and you can even walk the same day that the surgery is performed because there's not too much damage caused. Now what happens during this type of surgery, they place a camera in through one side and the other side they place the tools that they need to help repair the injury.

What they do during the surgery heavily depends on what type of injury or what type of tear happens to your meniscus. There might be terrorists that cause a flap which move around in the knee causing inflammation, damage and pain. And in that case, this part of the damage part of the meniscus might have to be removed Alternatively, there might be tears that happen at the ends of the meniscus. And in this case, you might be able to sew the ends, so them and tie them down, letting the healing process happen over time. This is a newer technique. But if you can have this technique done, it's absolutely preferable because you keep the shape of the meniscus intact, and therefore it can continue using it using as its function of spreading out the pressure from the cartilage, the bone of the femur.

Now, if you have your meniscus partially removed, over time, it's gonna have some side effects like damage to the cartilage causing osteoarthritis at a higher rate. It's a little bit unfortunate, but there's not much of an option if you have to have the damaged part of your meniscus reviews removed at this point in time. There are some newer techniques being tried out in trials right now. But these aren't quite relevant at the moment to review. There are two main treatments that you can do. For a miniscule injury, we're talking about an acute injury.

The first one is physical physical therapy. And this is the most important type of treatment, even if you have surgery as well. The second type of treatment is surgery, which doesn't, which doesn't, it's not appropriate for everybody. But if you haven't done what they will do with us in arthroscopy, putting a small camera in your knee, and the type of treatment done through this arthroscopy depends on the type of damage you have. I want to quickly mention treatment for chronic and degenerative meniscal injuries. There has been a few studies done showing that surgery is not very effective in these patients.

Now, it's very important for you to understand that because surgeons today are still very quick to suggest surgery as an option. But there have been very big studies showing that it's not very effective. So if you or somebody you know, has a degenerative injury, or chronic pain that happens over time, not because it was for injury, you should be a little bit skeptical if they're offering you surgery as an option. And even if they do offer your surgery, make sure that you do it together with physical therapy. Because again, as I've mentioned a few times now, this is the most important important part of treatment to this type of injury. All right here we're closing the chapter on meniscal injuries.

In the next chapter, we're going to start talking about injuries to the ligaments, the ACL and the PCL.