Tennis knee injury treatment – A Prolotherapy success story

When Kam was an avid tennis player who played twice a week. He had always been lean and active and now at age 66, he wanted to remain so. He worried that his Knee Pain would interfere with his active lifestyle. Kam was like many patients – he had pain while walking downstairs and warming up for tennis. The pain when playing would abate somewhat during play, but after a match the pain would become fairly severe, sometimes taking five days to subside.

Prolotherapy for meniscal repair

For his own peace of mind, Kam had an MRI. The images showed a small Baker’s cyst, a tear of the medial meniscus, high-grade chondromalacia, a focal chondral defect, and joint effusion. Needless to say, this report did not give him the confidence that a conservative treatment like Prolotherapy would work for such a laundry list of problems. During his second visit, he expressed his worries to Dr. Hauser and feared he may need knee surgery. Though he did not have any noticeable improvement from the first treatment, Dr. Hauser reassured him that from the physical exam his knee did not seem as bad as the MRI indicated and that he should do well with Prolotherapy.

Physical Activity In Between Prolotherapy Treatments

Kam reported at his third Prolotherapy treatment that he had improved 50-80% in his day-to-day pain. Though he was playing tennis regularly he was still having a great deal of pain after playing, pain when sleeping on his side, difficulty going downstairs and difficulty completely straightening his left leg. It seemed to Dr. Hauser that Kam was pushing too hard through the pain during his tennis matches. He wanted Kam to remain active, but the movements required during his tennis matches were too much for his injured knee. Here at Caring Medical, it is our job to counsel our patients that sometimes they will get better quicker if they avoid activities that cause sharp pain until they are completely healed with Prolotherapy, but we understand that athletes tend to push themselves and want to continue to play the sports they love.

So Kam took our advice to heart, and at his fourth visit, he said he had curtailed his tennis somewhat, only playing every other week two hours of doubles tennis. He said that stairs were becoming easier to negotiate and that it was less painful to turn over in bed when lying on his side. By the fifth visit, he really noticed that his knee was improving and it only took a day for his knee to recover after a tennis session, as before it would take five days. He was sleeping better and he noticed that the recumbent bike seemed to help his knee more than cycling in an upright position.

MRI is worse than the knee

We saw Kam nearly two years after his last knee Prolotherapy treatment and he told us that he was back to playing tennis two times per week (at age 68) and cycling regularly 30 minutes per day. Here was another situation where the MRI tried to scare the patient into surgery and, fortunately for this patient, they had faith in Prolotherapy.