Massage, Remedial Massage & Myotherapy for Knee Pain
Knee pain is all to common. It can affect you at every stage of your life.
In younger people the cause is usually either an acute injury, or a biomechanics issue – typically also involving excessive muscle loading/ tightness around the joint.
As we age, we are at greater risk of chronic diseases such as osteoarthritis. But did you know osteoarthritis is heavily linked to poor joint function? Often the biomechanics issue we talked about in the younger population goes untreated and ends up turning into a chronic issue.
The most common issue we see is where the knee cap doesn’t move straight up and down in its groove, causing pain. We’ve seen this in varying age groups from primary school children, to people in their 80’s. In fact it is thought that this type of dysfunction in a major precursor to knee osteoarthritis.
We believe that most knee pain is linked to poor joint function. Not only knee cap tracking issues as we mentioned above, but arthritis (still linked to poor tracking) as well as pain caused from other previous injury including meniscal tears.
By improving joint function, we can often make positive changes to your pain levels if you are suffering knee cap tracking issues, osteoarthritis or pain from previous knee injuries.
Massage, Remedial Massage & Myotherapy treatment for Knee Pain
Chronic Knee Pain
As we have stated previously helping people with knee pain is all about improving the function of the knee joint. The better we can get this, generally the less pain you will be in.
Massage, remedial massage & myotherapy treatment for knee pain will typically involve massage treatment to your leg muscles. Anything that is tight we release. This is because if this muscle crosses the knee joint, if it is tight it will have an effect on joint function.
Primarily though we focus on the quads. Tight quads play a major role in causing the patella not to move as we would like. The outside of the quad is often tighter pulling the knee cap towards the outside. This is normally the cause of runners knee and is extremely common in arthritis & chronic pain caused from previous knee injury.
Following your treatment your therapist will often advise some exercises to strengthen and/ or improve mobility of the muscles around your knee. These exercises are created to get you out of pain as fast as possible but also help to prevent a reoccurrence of the injury.
Finally, your therapist will advise on follow up. Usually in the case of a chronic knee issue, we’ll do a follow up appointment in a week. From there we follow as system we created to help get people out of pain long term – the “Rapid Recovery Pain Free Pathway.”
In summary, massage, remedial massage & myotherapy can be extremely beneficial for chronic knee pain. We focus improving muscular and joint function, which in most cases has a huge impact on knee pain. Exercises then help to keep the joint mobile and strong.
Want more info on arthritis?
Did you know we’ve found that many people who experience knee arthritis don’t actually have to? Even some that have knee replacements, probably didn’t need them? Or those that did, shouldn’t have been in the pain they were in the years leading up to it?
From our point of view arthritis is considered a normal part the ageing process. Think of it more like instead of having a few wrinkles on your face, they’re in your knee.
Now I’m not going to say we work miracles. In some cases, knee replacements are 100% warranted. But many people don’t go through the correct avenues of conservative treatment first.
We find that arthritis pain (unless yours is severe) typically occurs due to poor joint function. The better the joint functions, sometimes it’s just less pain but often no pain.
In fact, you could get 2 people with exactly the same x-ray results for knee osteoarthritis and one has pain, yet the other doesn’t. Why? We find normally, this is because of poor joint function. Improve the function and reduce the pain!
I recently read a study where people with knee arthritis attended fortnightly massage appointments. This resulted in a decrease in pain. The funny part of this is, the treatment wasn’t even targeted on the area like ours is. So, based on that (and our experience) I think we would achieve even better results.
In summary, massage should be used a lot more to help people with knee arthritis. In fact, evidence backs this. Through a range of targeted massage techniques, we improve joint function to ease your knee pain and improve mobility.
What about acute injuries?
So, we’ve talked about joint function and how fixing that often has a drastic effect on knee pain. However, there is a (semi) exception to this rule – acute injuries. Acute injuries require healing time. Our treatment can help speed up that, but it’s a fact of nature, the injury will still take time to heal.
However, generally speaking improving joint function will often still help to reduce pain levels. In many cases this will also help to optimise the healing environment. After all, if a joint isn’t functioning as it should, we can’t possibly think it will heal as well or as fast as it should.
At the same time, poor joint function could have played a factor in this injury in the first place. Joints with poor function are typically more prone to acute injuries – if it’s not functioning as it should it’s typically weaker and less able to deal with unexpected loads (or impact).
So, treatment for acute injuries will typically involve massage treatment to surrounding muscle tissue, focusing on tight areas. As the injury heals, we focus on regaining normal range of motion and then look to improve strength and return to activity!
Disclaimer:
At Rapid Recovery Clinic we’ve put together this article as a way to give back to our industry. For clients, potential clients, GP’s & other allied health professionals to gain a better understanding of how massage,myotherapy & remedial massage can help knee pain & injuries.
Everything in this article is the views of the author and what they have found to be the case in their clinical practice. This information is intended only as a guide. It is up to you to seek your own independent medical advice for your individual circumstances & knee pain or injury.