I was having this conversation with someone about my knee injury and I thought that it would be a perfect post to share with everyone.

1. It is essential that you feel comfortable with the environment, the staff and, most important of all, the physiotherapist. If you don’t feel comfortable with any of those I would say move on until you do.
2. Try and find a physiotherapist that has worked with an injury like yours, this helps to ensure that he/she knows how to treat your specific injury.
3. Make sure the equipment looks well maintained and up to date. If there are machines that look like something Houdini escaped from I would say get out as fast as you can.
4. The physiotherapy clinic needs to be convenient and easy for you to travel to. The reason for this is that there will we days when you are finished your physio session and you are going to be exhausted and in some serious discomfort. The last thing you want is a drastically long trek back home.

I realize the list is quite small, but to me those were the key elements for my recovery. If you have any other tips you would like to add please let me know.

This is the third and final segment of my lateral dislocation of my right patella saga. The journey has taken us through the early stages, the middle stages, and now its ultimate conclusion: the physiotherapy.

The first week of physio was really tough. My quadriceps had completely disappeared. I had no muscle, it was weird to look at and depressing to see how quickly muscle can deteriorate (the doctor and physiotherapist both said that after 3 days of inactivity your muscles will start to deteriorate, your body determines that it isn’t essential so it breaks it down ). But my quad wasn’t the focus; it was my knee, and getting its full range of motion back. At the beginning of the week I could barely bend my knee at all, but after a grueling week of physio my range started improving. Aside from the exercises, I also had the electrodes hooked up to the knee; this would work the muscle around the knee. I also had an ultrasound type thing that was rubbed around the knee and surrounding area to break up the scar tissue that had formed on the tendons. What happened in my situation was that I had stretched my tendon to the point of just about breaking it apart, and because of that trauma there was a lot of micro fibrous tears throughout the tendon; and that is what the physiotherapist needed to repair as well.

Read the rest of this entry »»»