A high school basketball player came in to see me with debilitating pain in his knees. The pain was located on the bump on the lower leg below the kneecaps. Both legs were hurting.
Of course he was given the diagnosis of Osgood-Schlatter’s disease and told nothing could be done for it. He just had to rest, use anti-inflammatory drugs, ice, etc.
Osgood-Schlatter’s is a description of symptoms where the patellar tendon is pulling on the bone at its attachment site. It’s the bump you feel if you were to kneel down.
In this diagnosis the bump will be swollen, painful, and quite often the bone will start pulling away and create spurs. But it doesn’t tell you WHY. It just puts a name to the collection of symptoms.
My patient was a really good basketball player, but he couldn’t play anymore. The pain was too great.
In my exam I found his quadriceps muscles weren’t working how they should. It makes sense since the quadriceps control the patellar tendon. The exact tendon that causes the problem.
But I couldn’t figure out WHY his quadriceps weren’t neurologically firing correctly. I found some herbs that worked, but every time he stopped taking them his pain came back. While it was a component to the problem, it wasn’t the REAL CAUSE.
So then he went to a few other practitioners for a month or so and nobody had answers for him.
When he came back to see me I started from scratch. Started asking deeper questions trying to find a possible connection.
I wasn’t satisfied with the Osgood-Schlatter’s diagnosis. The name doesn’t matter to me. I’ve always been able to help those cases and I wasn’t about to let this one beat me.
His quadriceps muscles were still not neurologically firing correctly. They were “weak”, or what we call inhibited. I knew that if we could get them working, the pain would go away.
It turned out the pain had been going on for about a year and a half. I asked if anything happened around that time and he said he broke his clavicle [collarbone].
Hmmm.
So I had him touch over the site of the break and retested the strength of his quadriceps. Instant restoration of full neurological power.
The fracture had obviously healed a long time ago, but there was a continual noxious signal being put into his nervous system. Touching the site stimulated the nerves, which caused the muscles to temporarily normalize.
Scar tissue had accumulated in the covering of the bone, called the periosteum. This periosteum is where all the nerves are. And any nerve in the body has the capability of disrupting how the rest of the body functions.
Don’t ever forget that last sentence.
So I corrected the scar tissue and the “Osgood-Schlatter’s disease” vanished instantly. The quadriceps muscles instantly normalized, but it took a few days before the pain and swelling diminished.
He went on to have an excellent high school basketball career.
Since this case I make sure to look at old bone injuries and fractures. It’s amazing how they can be causing problems years later, even though they “healed”.
The body does the best it can when it heals. But just because the actual area doesn’t hurt anymore doesn’t mean it healed it perfectly. Leave no stone unturned.