PT Guide
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Meniscal Tear and Physical Therapy
I am a physical therapist with good shepherd pen partners and recently there have been four studies that have studied whether an individual with a miniscule tear should have physical therapy or surgery, now in these studies, they looked at individuals who had degenerative miniscule tears with and without arthritis and they found that if an individual was treated with physical therapy versus those who were treated with surgery and physical therapy, there was really no difference in outcomes so the recommendation is, have the physical therapy first, now there will always be some patients who are going to require surgery and they are usually individuals who have significant disability, lots of pain, buckling with walking, really you should talk to your surgeon about that but if we can predict with future research, I think that will be the answer.
I want to talk about the four different physical therapy programs that we are using those studies and find some commonalities between them, Mike Pearcy is an advanced physician, physical therapist for good shepherd pen partners and he is going to go over that rehabilitation program to address miniscule tears.
This is a stationary bicycle, it’s a good way to get some range of motion and get moving before you go into additional exercises, this is the gastroc stretch, it’s good to improve gastroc flexibility as well as knee and ankle range of motion, we can flex the knee just a bit for additional flexibility, this is the prune quad stretch, it’s good to improve quad flexibility and knee range of motion, this is the hamstring, it’s good to improve hamstring flexibility and also to improve knee range of motion.
This is the long arc quad, it’s a good foundational exercise for quad strengthening, this is the standing hamstring curl, it’s a good foundational exercise for hamstring strengthening. This is the ball squat exercise, you can use this for quad and glute strengthening, it’s a good foundational exercise to allow us to build upon progressions at a later time.
This is the single leg balance, you can use this for physical training, to progress this exercise, we can use a foam mat to make the exercise more challenging, this is the step up exercise, we utilize this for quad or glute strengthening, there are three different step heights to allow us to make the exercise easier or harder.
This is the leg extension machine, it can be utilized for quad strengthening as a progression from lumbar quads, you are able to put a little bit more resistance on this machine to allow that to progress the strengthening, the leg flexion machine, you can utilize this for hamstring strengthening as a progression from hamstring curl, with the machine, you are able to progress strengthening by adding additional weight.
This is the leg press machine, you are utilizing this for quad and glute strengthening as a progression from ball squats, you are also able to utilize this machine as a single leg squat versus double leg as an additional progression.