Call 281-633-8600 for an appointment. Dr. Bennett talks about knee injuries in this episode of the Dr. Jay Show. Dr. J. Michael Bennett is a Board Certified Orthopedic Surgeon and Fellowship Trained Sports Medicine Doctor serving patients from Greater Houston through offices in Sugar Land, near First Colony Mall and Houston, near the Houston Galleria. If you’ve experienced a knee injury and would like an appointment for an evaluation from a knee specialist, please call 281-633-8600.
This is the transcript of a radio show that was hosted by Dr. Bennett on 1560 The Game. With Dr. Bennett talking about knee injuries was Bob Lewis of 1560 The Game and Dr. Stephen Simonich of Katy Orthopedics in Katy, TX.
DR. J. MICHAEL BENNETT — I’m Dr. Jay Michael Bennett, I’ve been raised here in Houston, Texas, I trained over here at Baylor College of Medicine and did my orthopedic residency there. I followed that up with a fellowship in sports medicine in Miami and I’m currently practicing in the greater Houston area. I’m with the Fondren Orthopedic Group and I have a sports medicine practice and I specialize in shoulders, elbows and knees and general orthopedic surgery as well. We’ve also got Dr. Stephen Simonich here from University of Texas Sports Medicine, and he’s actually also a fellowship trained sports medicine orthopedic surgeon who’s here to inform us of the newest techniques and some of the current concepts regarding knee injuries and knee surgery.
If this is your first time tuning into the show, the mission statement here is to update you and inform you and clarify it all to you in a very entertaining way, focusing on the three Ms regarding medicine in general, that’s Misunderstandings, Misconceptions and Myths. And our goal is really to make you an informed consumer. The way I see it is patients should really approach medicine as a product, and you really need to research your physicians and the procedures you are about to undergo, and research them almost as much as you would buying a car, or buying a new product that you really could have put a lot of money into and investment into. Because in the end it is your health and wellness and those are probably about the most important things to you. At the end of the last show we talked about extreme sports injuries and I had all you guys – if you did your homework – go to YouTube to check out the Willis McGahee injury at the University of Miami.
It was actually a very gruesome injury if you saw the video. It used to be a a devastating injury, I mean if you look at orthopedic surgery about 10 years ago or so, 15 years ago, that kind of injury would be a career-ending one and he pretty much for all intents and purposes had a knee dislocation injuring his ACL, PCL and MCL and we’ll go into some of that –definition wise – in a minute here with Dr. Simonich. But the incredible thing is that now he’s back playing and he’s actually doing a pretty good job out there so the fact is, technology evolves, orthopedic procedures evolve, and it’s pretty incredible that what was once a devastating injury is now something you can recover from and actually get back to your sport. So anyway I want to go ahead and welcome Dr. Simonich here and Steve, can you give us a little bit about your background and tell us what you do and where you practice.
SIMONICH – Sure and thanks for having me here. I’m also a Texas boy myself, my dad worked for an oil company and we moved around but we mostly lived here in Texas. I attended the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston for medical school and I did my residency at the University of Florida and I did my sports fellowship out in California in Los Angeles and then moved back to Texas. I also, as you mentioned earlier, work here in Houston, I have a practice down at the Medical Center and also out in Katy. I think it’s great that you’re having a show about knee injuries. I actually have that McGahee video and I use it in my multi-injury ligament talks and it’s definitely a brutal injury and it’s amazing that some of these elite athletes have come back from that. I don’t know where you want to start Jay, but I think it was great that you mentioned that patients ask questions and I always encourage patients to ask me questions and in fact I ask them that if they haven’t written them down to go and think about things and write them down since sometimes they forget in the clinic. I think it’s very important and maybe today we could start off by just talking about anatomy. I think a lot of people just don’t understand some of the fundamental anatomy of the knee. It seems like just a simple hinge joint and there’s really three joints that we worry about and you’ll hear doctors talk about three “compartments” of the knee: there’s the femur bone, which is the thigh bone and which makes up the top of the knee; and then there’s the tibia bone, which makes up the bottom of the knee; and then there’s the patella. And there’s two parts to each, the tibia and fibia, the medial compartment or the inside compartment in someone’s knee, and the outside compartment, and then there’s the patella compartment. So that’s the three compartments you’ll hear some doctors talk about.
BENNETT – And, one other quick thing, the cartilage, I think we get that mixed up a lot, would you agree?
SIMONICH – Oh yeah, that’s definitely a key thing. I actually consider that the holy grail of orthopedics. I think you’ll hear a lot of buzz about cartilage regeneration, cartilage replacement, cartilage micro-fracture. I think every orthopedist out there, their dream is to figure out how to create or re-create cartilage or how to get it to grow back and that really is the kind of internal fountain of youth. Everyone out there is going out and spending all kinds of money on plastic surgery, whereas this is almost like a reversal or a plastic surgery for the internal joint because what good are you if you can’t go out and run if you want to run or play with your kids or if you want to go out and do some sports or if you just want to enjoy daily activities if your knee is giving out on you or if your elbow hurts or your shoulder hurts.
BENNETT – So cartilage is definitely a key issue and I think, Steve, I’d like you to, going back to Willis McGahee and the multi-ligament injury, you know I threw out those abbreviations, the ACL, PCL and the MCL. Just real quickly define what each one of those ligaments is and describe a little bit about what they do and their purposes for the athlete.
SIMONICH – Okay, well, like we talked about previously on the anatomy, there’s these bones and without these ligaments, which attach a bone to another bone, the knee would just fall apart. So the different ligaments that we’re talking about: the ACL, I think most people have understood because it is out there and it’s the most studied ligament in the knee, perhaps in the body, and that stands for Anterior Cruciate Ligament; and the PCL is Posterior Cruciate Ligament and is in the middle of the knee; and then on the sides we’ve got the MCL, the Medial Collateral Ligament, and on the outside the Lateral Collateral Ligament.
BENNETT – So typically those are like the ropes that hold your knees together?
SIMONICH – That’s right.
BENNETT – So they keep you stable. So anyway, we’re going to take a break here, and come back with Dr. Steve Simonich, and we’re going to discuss further knee injuries and please feel free to call in…
If you’d like to make an appointment for an evaluation of your knee injury with Dr. Bennett, please call our office at 281-633-8600. Please share this information with your friends by using the social media buttons below!
