What are the common mistakes that patients make when selecting treatment for knee meniscus trauma, ligament tears, for patellofemoral joint injury? Well, again, there are two or three categories. One category is patients with a recent knee injury, and you wonder what they had to do. But usually, you find patients who do too much. They go beyond their limits. And unfortunately, there are many patients with [meniscus trauma, knee ligament injury] who don’t do what they had to do because they are concerned. They are kind of apprehensive. In those cases, rather than saying, “which are rehabilitation exercises patients don’t do well?” The cause of poor rehabilitation is the fact that patients don’t do exercises because of the pain. And then the patient allows the pain to win. That’s a very real problem for a good knee rehabilitation process. There is no one specific exercise that I consider malicious or wrong for the knee. It depends. For example, if you treat the patellofemoral joint, you cannot allow weight-bearing and flexion of the knee in the first weeks after surgery. But if you do cartilage transplantation, for example, it’s different. The more you move the knee, the better the cartilage graft is filled. So, again, I think that the worst problem for the knee is to keep it immobilized. And that’s something that, unfortunately, I see in many cases. I see patients come to my office after weeks of having knee immobilized. Their knee has been kept straight. The problem then is not only to restore the full range of motion. Immobilization also kills the cartilage. Once the cartilage is dead, there is no resuscitation of cartilage. The cartilage does not come back to life. So we have to protect the cartilage in any knee injury condition by moving the knee.
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