Today, we got many of the same patients that I had come to know throughout last week. Many of the patients Response Therapy gets are patients with shoulder or knee pain/injuries. There are one or two surgeons that know Response Therapy well and know that Dan is particularly specialized in shoulders and knees. Jeffrey did however explain that while Response Therapy is best at shoulders and knees, they are more than comfortable accepting patients with ailments in other areas and already readily do so. Although many of the patients today were the same, I did see a few new patients. There was an extremely sweet lady who came in whose right leg was unfortunately crippled from polio as a younger child. However, she does wear a brace and can walk around with it with the help of a walker. What brought her to us at Response Therapy was that she fell some time ago and broke the tibia in her left leg, so she could no longer support herself. Response Therapy helped with her rehab to regain the muscle lost in her left leg due to atrophy. For a long time, before her fall, she was “furniture surfing”, a term Jeffrey explained was when patients would subconsciously look for support on surround furniture or cars or other objects when trying to get around. The goal is to help curb the need for furniture surfing and to help build up strength in the left leg to where the patient can get up a sidewalk curb using just her walker. We did a long of walking in the gym with her to continue building up muscle in the left leg. So far, everything looks extremely promising and the goal seems entirely attainable!
Alongside the sweet polio patient, I saw a lot of new patients that had ACL tears. Two of these patients actually had ACL and meniscus tears. I realized that the term weight-bearing came up quite frequently with these two patients and noticed that they both had crutches. This prompted me to ask Jeffrey why ACL tear patients were weight-bearing immediately whereas ACL and meniscus tear patients were not. Jeffrey explained that, in the knee, the ACL does not actually aid in supporting any weight, it has more to do with the movement of the knee anteriorly. Thus, he explained, weight would not hinder or detriment the healing process of an ACL patient, although twisting, running, jumping, cutting, etc. would affect the ACL. The reason why ACL and meniscus patients are non-weight-bearing is because of the meniscus. The meniscus is located right between the femur and the knee and serves as a sort of compression cushion when putting weight through the leg. Thus, if a patient with a meniscus injury were to put weight on their leg while the meniscus was healing, it would potentially damage the meniscus again, not allowing it to heal properly.
