What Kind of Treatment Does Your ACL Injury Knee-d?

If you have injured your anterior cruciate ligament or ACL, you are out of luck. As one of the main ligament in your knee and the body part that actually controls the position and rotational stability of the knee, your ACL is quite important. However, luckily for you (but not for everyone else) it is one of the most common sport’s injuries. This means that any doctor you see will be able to give you state-of-the-art ACL care because they have a lot of experience.

How Can You Injure Your ACL?

About 200,000 people injure their ACL each year, and half of those require reconstructive surgery for a full recovery. The most common culprits for ACL injuries are sports like basketball, football, skiing, and soccer. Essentially—if it is high-speed, high-risk, and high-contact, you have a good chance of destroying your ACL, as well as other ligaments and cartilage in your knee.

Most injuries happen when you are not in control of your body during play. While it can happen when colliding with another player, most ACL injuries are actually the result of non-contact moves, especially spinning or landing strangely. When you do injure your ACL, your knee will be in a lot of pain, and it will quickly swell up to a very large size.

Surgery or Not?

While most people automatically assume that an ACL injury will require surgery, that is not always the case. In some cases, physical therapy can bring the knee back to an almost-new condition. Sometimes the patient will wear a knee brace. In these circumstances, you must be extra careful. Obviously, your ACL is still weak and will never “fully” recover. You will be given a lot of special training on how to treat your knee and avoid instability and pain.

In most cases, however, surgery will be required or at least heavily recommended. Luckily, the surgery is generally endoscopic, meaning that it is fast and non-invasive and leaves minimal scarring. The surgeon does not sew the ACL back together, but rather replaces it with a special graft made from tendons from other parts of the body.