When most people think of knee injuries, they don’t think of serious, life-altering damage. It’s true that some knee injuries are mild and heal on their own, but in other cases, they can lead to massive medical bills, short-term or long-term disability, and considerable physical pain. Here’s what to know about the many kinds of knee injuries and what causes them.
Common Causes Of Knee Injuries
Your knees are built to withstand a lot of stress — but they aren’t invincible. These are some of the situations that are most likely to cause injuries to your knees.
Car Accidents
Knee injuries can happen when the joint is suddenly twisted or subjected to a strong impact. In some cases, deep lacerations can also injure your knees. All of these types of injuries are possible if you are involved in a car accident.
The adrenaline rush that comes with a car accident can make it harder for you to feel pain. As a result, you might think you’re okay (or that you just have a slight injury) when you are actually suffering from a severe knee injury. For this reason, it’s critical to seek emergency medical care immediately after a car accident.
Sports Injuries and General Overuse Injuries
Many kinds of athletics subject your knees to unique stresses, and those stresses can sometimes lead to serious injuries. Repeated stress (like long-distance running or repeated jumping) can cause overuse injuries.
It’s also possible to suffer an acute injury. For example, meniscus tears are common knee injuries that often happen when your knee is suddenly or forcefully twisted.
You don’t have to be an athlete to suffer injuries like these. For example, you can develop an overuse injury in your knee if you frequently walk up and down stairs.
Slips and Falls
Many knee injuries happen as a result of sudden twisting, and that’s something that often occurs in slip and fall accidents. There are many different ways to suffer a slip and fall, including:
- Accidentally walking onto a wet floor
- Tripping on rumpled carpet or uneven floorboards
- Slipping on ice
- Tripping on potholes or cracked sidewalks
The severity of a slip and fall knee injury is determined by many different factors, including your overall health and fitness, age, and how you land. Two people might slip on the same hazard, and one may walk away unharmed while the other suffers a severe knee injury.
Workplace Injuries
It’s possible to suffer almost any kind of knee injury at work. For example, if your job involves repeated squatting, you might develop an overuse injury. Falls and other sudden events can also cause injuries.
Knees are complex structures. In a healthy knee, the bones, cartilage, muscles, tendons, and ligaments all work together. But if even one of those structures is damaged, it can seriously impact your life. Some knee injuries are more common than others.
Ligament Tears
Even if you aren’t very familiar with the anatomy of the knee, you’ve probably heard of ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) tears. Your ACL connects your femur (thigh bone) to your tibia (shin bone), and it helps prevent your knee from rotating too much. Many ACL tears happen when your knee is forcefully twisted or over-rotated.
Cartilage Tears
Twisting your knee can also cause injuries to cartilage, the tough tissue that cushions and protects your bone. The most common cartilage injury in the knee is a torn meniscus. Your meniscus is a piece of cartilage between the bones in your knee, and each knee has two.
Tendinitis and Other Tendon Injuries
Ligaments connect bones to other bones. Tendons connect muscles to bones. If a tendon becomes inflamed or torn, it can cause significant knee pain.
One of the most common kinds of knee tendinitis is “jumper’s knee,” an inflammation of the tendon that connects your patella (kneecap) to your tibia. Despite the name, jumper’s knee can affect you even if you don’t do a lot of jumping — it also is common in runners, cyclists, and anyone else who frequently uses their knee joints.
How Are Knee Injuries Treated?
Because there are so many complex structures in your knee, a medical professional may need to do one or more imaging tests to determine the exact nature of your injury. Once you have the right diagnosis, your doctor can come up with a treatment plan. These are some of the most common treatments for knee injuries.
Medications and Injections
If your knee injury is mild, your doctor might suggest that you rest it, apply ice, and take over-the-counter anti-inflammatory medications. Sometimes, if excessive inflammation is making your injury worse, your doctor also might recommend corticosteroid injections.
Surgery
If your knee injury is too serious to heal on its own, you may need surgery. Fortunately, in many cases, knee surgery can be performed arthroscopically. That means the surgery can be performed by making just a few tiny incisions in your knee.
Your surgeon will use a specialized camera and narrow surgical tools to do the repair. This kind of surgery greatly reduces your risk of scarring, and recovery is usually much less painful than recovering from a traditional surgery.
However, arthroscopic surgery is not always an option. For instance, if you need a total knee replacement, the surgery will be much more involved and will require a longer recovery period.
Physical Therapy
Whether your knee injury requires surgery or not, your doctor will likely recommend physical therapy. When you build up the muscles around the knee joint, it becomes more stable. That can reduce your risk of further injury.
Our Team Is Here To Help
Sometimes, a knee injury might be caused by your own actions. But in other cases, another person’s actions — or failure to act — may lead to you suffering a major injury. When this happens, you shouldn’t be left to handle the fallout while the responsible party goes on as if nothing happened.
However, trying to pursue compensation on your own can be frustrating, confusing, and, ultimately, unsuccessful. At Runion Personal Injury Lawyers, our team is dedicated to fighting for you when you’re at your most vulnerable.
When you’re trying to heal from an injury, you might feel as though you don’t have the energy to start a legal case. However, if we take your case, we’ll be able to handle the logistics for you, giving you the opportunity to focus on your recovery. Contact us today for your free case review at (602) 595-5559.
