Tags
arthritis, fitness, health, knee-pain, Muscoskeletal aignment, osteoarthritis, The Egoscue Method
A little over two years ago, I hurt my knee. I was doing some vigorous aerobic workout style dancing. I might have twisted my right knee and it started to hurt really badly. I thought it would be fine in a couple of weeks by giving it the usual TLC. But it took over two years to heal it. And it turned out to be quite an opportunity to learn.
Whenever I talk to my contemporaries, the topic of knee pain comes up frequently. So, I thought I would share here my journey of healing my knee pain and more importantly the resources I found useful. Trust others will find this information useful.
In this Part 2 of this series of blog posts, I share different resources for the major underlying causes of knee issues, that is knee alignment.
History and Background
You see I have been dealing with knee pain off and on for a long time. About 30 years ago, I took up the goal of running a marathon. I started the training. Ran my first 5K and then my right knee started hurting whenever I would run. Could not figure out how to run pain free. So, that was the end of my marathon running goal.
Since that episode, over the last thirty years, I have been working on bringing my knee functionally to 100%, judging by the capacity and capability of my left knee. It is still not there 100%, but it is the closest it has come to that goal in thirty years.
Orthopedic specialist diagnosed the causes of my knee pain to be arthritis. Initially, arthritis was diagnosed as mild. At my last check up about two years ago, I was told it was more like mild to moderate.
But what caused my arthritis? And was there another reason for pain? So, could you I just everything I wanted to do in spite of my arthritis. After all, my left knee also has mild arthritis. But I never feel any pain issues in my left knee.
In Part I, I discussed structural issues of the knee that could lead to knee pain. Knee misalignment is the topic of this blog post.
Turns out if knee is not properly aligned between the hip and the ankle, that can be an issue two different ways.
First, if the weight is born disproportionately by the spot where the cartilage is missing, it will cause pain.
Second, the part of the cartilage that bears disproportionate amount of the body weight, repetitive motion, e.g., running or jumping rope, can also erode cartilage on that part of the knee.
Knee misalignment becomes a sort of a vicious negative cycle. So, fixing knee misalignment is imperative for a lasting solution.
Resource for Fixing Misalignment – The Egoscue Method
I got introduced to Pete Egoscue the creator of the Egoscue Method almost 30 years ago at Tony Robbins Life Mastery program in Hawaii. Pete Egoscue demonstrated a very unique way of correcting joint pains due to one or more body misalignment. Even more amazingly eliminating the pain through some simple exercises, he called e-Cises.
Unfortunately, when I first encountered my knee pain, Pete Egoscue was not easily accessible, since he lived and practiced on the west coast. On hindsight, I should have probably gotten on a plane and worked with him anyways. I basically relied on his first book. And, ended up helping myself and a lot of other people with some issues, including back pains. But could not really fix knee misalignment on my own.
Now his technique is accessible through Egoscue clinics around the world. You can find probably one in every major city in the US. And now therapists can also work with you over a Zoom Call.
This time around, that is what I did, since my traumatic knee pain episode occurred in the middle of COVID pandemic. I worked with the Egoscue Clinic in Arlington VA.
The therapist takes pictures and checks out the alignment to diagnose what misalignment might be causing the issue. Here is one of set of my pictures. You simply draw a straight line from hip to the ankle. If the line does not cross in the middle it indicates misalignment can can cause knee issues over time.
Also, it is important to diagnose whether your knee is overly internally rotated, i.e., pronated, or overly externally rotated, i.e., supinated. During load bearing activities, either of these situations can lead to greater stress at the knee joints and the ligaments and can lead to knees issues and knee pain.
My right knee was bow-legged and externally rotated. See the below picture before I started the Egoscue therapy.
Those conditions were causing stress on the inside of the knee joint, where cartilage had also eroded. What came first the cartilage erosion or the bow-leggedness and the external rotation? That was the question, I have always wondered, but don’t know the answer to this chicken-or-egg question.
Based on the diagnosis, the therapist then have you try a series of e-Cises. Those e-Cises become the menu that you would do over the next couple of weeks or longer.
After practicing the give menu of e-Cises, with the therapist again, to reassess and create a new menu. Often, it becomes a process of “peeling the onion” by resolving first the superficial issue and then go on to resolving the deeper issues that might be at the core. Lot of time, taking care of the superficial issues often resolve the pain. However, it is really important to get the whole body in alignment to resolve things permanently and even preventatively.
The following picture shows alignments after working with the Egoscue therapist. As you can see, alignment of the right knee is a whole lot better, but head alignment still needs work. Ideally, head should be in line with shoulder, hips, knee and ankle. And, both shoulder should also be parallel to the ground.
My experience – Working with an Egoscue therapist, I discovered bow-leggedness and the tendency for my right knee to outwardly rotate lessened significantly. While working on the knee, the therapist also pointed out issue with the curvature of both my lower back and the upper back. These curvature issues were leading to pain in my lower back. I also worked on the back issues and significantly improved the alignment. Another important outcome was that I got quite aware of my posture and how that could lead to other musculoskeletal issues.
Bottom Line:
From my research and experience, I have found that it is important to find out what is the underlying structural issue for knee pain. It is equally important to diagnose to see if knee falls outside a straight-line connecting hip and ankle and if knees is rotated inward or outward. Either of these conditions can cause wear and tear of the cartilage and/or undue stress on the other connective tissue from repeated use under load-bearing conditions. It can also be the source of knee pain.
Working with a therapist trained in the Egoscue Method can be very effective in re-aligning the knee.
Of course, this is not medical advice, and you should check with a medical doctor about your specific situation.
What are your thoughts or experience on this subject?
Have you used other therapies or methods for correcting body misalignment.
Would love to hear from you and learn from you.
Please click on Comment to leave your comments or question so others can benefit from your input.
As I mentioned in my previous post #58, I consider Michael Greger’s website 
In my blog post #9 – When it comes to health, vitality and aging what is really possible?, I had discussed the book, Prevent and Reverse Hearth Disease by Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. M.D. In this book, Dr. Fuhrman’s has updated research on preventing and reversing heart disease. Case studies are mind blowing. He not only gives research but actually prescription on what you should actually eat and even very specific meal plans. Dr. Furhman promises his patients to let him decide what they eat for six weeks and then based on the result they can then decide what to eat. Most of them become converts to his prescription of nutrition after seeing the results.
I did a series for posts #51-#54 on How to Optimize Your Immune System. In this book, Dr. Fuhrman offers a lot more research and very practical ways to build immunity so your body can fight whatever comes its way – not only flues and colds, but also other infections and even cancer. Cancer after-all is just DNA mutation that body fights all day long. Only when our immune system is NOT capable of handling the mutated DNA, it starts to take over the organs unchecked. Again, the book includes nutrition meal plans, recipes to put into practice his philosophy – not just eat food that is packed with desired micro-nutrients, but eat a lot of it.
In blog post #50, I discussed how to optimize your health by maximizing your telomeres. Elizabeth Blackburh received Nobel Prize for her research in telomeres. Telomeres are the end-caps at the ends of our DNA strands like little plastic wraps at the end of shoe laces. If the little plastic wraps are damaged shoe laces become useless, so is the case with the DNA. The length of telomeres correlate with the remaining lifespan. Dr. Blackburn shares the latest research in lay-person language and shares the different methods by which we can increase the length of our telomeres. Reading this book, it should not come as surprise to you that the lifestyle choices I discussed in my Post #59, all help increase the lengths of your telomeres.
Time did a fantastic job in summarizing the latest in science of exercise in this special Time Magazine publication. If you needed any further evidence how exercise impacts health and lifespan, I believe this publication will deliver, without having to read some big tome. The issue spans many diverse topics: cardio vs. weights, high intensity interval training, running, swimming, yoga and other exercise modalities.
In my blog post #17 – Is meditation an effective antidote to stress, I talk about Transcendental Meditation or TM as a very effective and well-researched means for combating stress. Science of Being and Art of Living is book compiled based on lectures by Maharishi Mahesh, who introduced TM to the West. He also founded the TM movement that has established TM Centers pretty much in all major cities throughout the world. While first part of the book serves as evidence and motivation for TM, the later parts are more for the practitioners and advanced students of TM and Yoga.
A few months ago, I got a chance to meet and attend a work shop by Dr. Levy, who has spent all his life building bridges between Western medicine and Eastern philosophies of yoga and meditation. Dr. Levy talks about how to prevent and reverse heart diseases by tackling the most insidious of the issues that impact heart health, i.e., Stress. This manual is accompanied by CDs on which you will find and can actually use his hypnosis techniques for relieving stress and anxiety.
In this more recent publication, The Happiness Sutra, Dr. Levy further delves into the four different types of stresses humans face and how best to deal with all four types of stresses. This book also has a CD that you can listen to to get the benefit of Dr. Levy’s hypnosis methods for relieving stress.
Lissa Rankin, M.D.’s book Mind Over Medicine is a great case study of extreme stress brought on modern living and by our current medical system. Dr. Rankin, a practicing OB GYN, quit her practice of medicine because of the numerous health and personal issues brought on by stress from her profession. She eventually found ways to heal herself and then learned to apply her new found knowledge to become a true healer, without becoming slave to the medical system.
Purposely Live to120 