In this video, we're going to talk about injuries to the ligaments of the knee. If you haven't already seen the video about the general anatomy of the knee, go back and watch that because it's important to understand what I talked about in that video to understand the type of injuries that you can have. Now, as I mentioned, there are four main ligaments. There are the collateral ligaments on the sides of your knees, on the one on the inside and one of the outside of each knee. And there are the cruciate ligaments inside the knee that crisscross according to the name cruciate, the collateral ligaments preventing me from the side to side motion and give them support that way. And the cruciate ligaments give your knee support from front to back.

Now injuries to these ligaments can happen usually also during sports, things that involve a twisting motion of your knee. As we mentioned, basketball, volleyball, surfing, snowboarding, skiing. These are the main sports That happened that gives you that give you a risk for damage of that twisting motion to your knee. After an initial injury, your knee should swell up and have local pain and it might be a little bit painful to even to step on. But this this inflammation that happens right after the injury should go away within a few weeks at the most. If you have a tear to one of these ligaments, and an ACL, for example, your anterior cruciate ligament, which prevents your knee from sliding forward.

If you have a tear to this ligament, even after the initial injury goes away, your knee will feel unstable. As you're walking or running your knee might feel like it's giving out. These are the main signs of a cruciate ligament injury, there will be no pain as you're walking normally, but if your knee gives out, it might hurt quite a bit. The posterior cruciate ligament, which sits right behind the ACL, is the same type of injury as the ACL. But the knee will slide down The other way. The ACL again prevents the shin from sliding forward.

The PCL prevents it from sliding backwards. Let's talk about treatment to terrorists to the ACL and PCL. Now, if you have a complete tear, the only way to repair it is with surgery. If you have a partial tear, you don't need surgery and it might repair itself. But either if you get surgery or if you don't get surgery, physical therapy is the most important part of management and treatment for these type of injuries. This goes for both full tears and partial tears.

Now if you have a full tear of one of your ligaments of the knee, let's say your ACL for example, you don't necessarily need to repair it. You can live a long and healthy life without an ACL for example, if you have a full tear, the only thing is it will will greatly restrict the amount of activities that you can do. You won't be able to play sports like basketball soccer, but if you Want to walk without doing too many without doing too many action sports, you don't necessarily need this type of surgery. However, if you want to get back into the world of sports, physical exercise and things a little bit more high intensity, it is important to fix that ACL and get the surgery done. I'm going to quickly very quickly mentioned what kind of surgery happens if you have a full tear of your ACL.

Now what they do is they take some type of tissue, whether it be from yourself or from somebody else, and they reconstruct the ACL as it was. There are a few techniques to do this, the most modern and in my opinion, the best one is called all inside. So if you can find a surgeon that does this technique, that's the best way to go. This reconstruct this ligament by drilling holes through the bone and suspending the ligaments through the outside of the bone. There are videos on YouTube that you can see exactly how it's done, but I'm not going to go too in depth into that right now. Let's quit.

We review this topic of ligament injuries. We said that these injuries happen during a twisting motion of the knee during high intensity sports like basketball, soccer, volleyball, skiing after the initial injury, you might not have pain, but your knee will feel unstable. And you might feel like giving out as you're walking or running. If there's a partial tear, you don't need surgery, but you do need to do physical therapy and be careful until your knee repairs itself. And if there's a full tear, the only way to really repair the knee is to do surgery. But this is not something that you necessarily need, unless you want to get back into these high intensity sports.

All right, we're going to close this chapter on ligaments. And this closes the chapter on different types of knee injury. We have one more video talking about fluid in the knee. But if you have any questions, be sure to write them down on the board, and we'll answer them as quickly as we can