Call 281-633-8600 for an appointment. In this video, Dr. J. Michael Bennett talks about knee cartilage injury as a cause of knee pain and locking and popping of the knee. If it is a cartilage injury causing your knee pain, you don’t want to ignore it. Dr. Bennett is a Board Certified Orthopedic Surgeon and a Fellowship Trained Sports Medicine Specialist with offices in Sugar Land and Houston, near the Houston Galeria. He specializes in treating knee injuries.
– Hello, welcome. My name is Dr. J. Michael Bennett. I’m a Board Certified Orthopedic Surgeon and a Fellowship Trained Sports Medicine Specialist, and welcome to the White Board Series. Today we’re just actually going to discuss one topic or one question we get quite a bit of in our clinic is: most patients that come in, their primary complaint is my knee just popped and now it’s swollen. What do I do? We’re going to go over some things today regarding a popping sensation in the knee, what exactly that means.Knee cartilage injuries
So the first thing you’ll notice is usually it’s going to be painful and you’ll feel, or actually hear sometimes, an audible pop in the knee, usually associated with a twisting or
 |
turning motion or sometimes occasionally from a direct blow or impact. So when it comes to locking or popping of the knee, it can be caused by a cartilage injury within the actual lining itself, which is along here. And this is actually a cartilage lining that you see here, the blue area of the joint. And you can have cartilage flaps actually detach from this area and create a flap where you an take a little punch hole or a little crater within the cartilage itself. This is more chronic.
These are more arthritic changes. Because after you lose a portion of this cartilage, you have exposed bone underneath there. And that’s basically wear and tear. And sometimes these can occur acutely as well from a fall or an injury because of an impact injury occurring here. So that can create actually a loose body or a loose piece of cartilage that maybe either hinged open like a flap or a loose floating body within the joint. And that little floating body can get stuck anywhere in the joint and depending on where it is, it can determine how much pain you feel and whether or not the knee locks up on you.
If it’s floating up around this area, it’s not going to bother you much. But if it’s in the middle of the joint right around here, it’s going to get stuck and it’s going to be like walking on a pebble, walking with your shoes that has a pebble and actually will occasionally hurt when you step directly on the pebble, but otherwise doesn’t bother you much. Same thing with these loose bodies in the joint.
So it’s another reason to get evaluated by an orthopedic specialist just to make sure there’s nothing serious going on in the joint regarding these loose bodies. Because they can wear down the cartilage around that area. Every time it bumps up and down against this cartilage, it can speed up arthritis and cause problems. If you have questions, feel free to visit my website at www.jmichaelbennett.com or www.orthopedicsportsdoctor.com or feel free to call my office at 281-633-8600. Thank you very much.
Call us at 281-633-8600 for an appointment in Sugar Land or 713-234-3152 in Houston. Dr. Bennett also recorded a video of a typical knee examination, which may give you an idea of what your appointment will be like.
