Creaky Knees and Running – Mythbusters!

All right, so today what we’re going to talk about is creaky knees, knee arthritis and running. There’s a lot of talk out there that running will give you arthritis in your knees and is bad for your knees.

One of the recent publications in the British Journal of Sports Medicine recently, disputes that, and actually, the literature suggests that in recreational runners, the incidence of osteoarthritic knees is about three and a half percent, whereas it’s about 10% in the sedentary population.

However, it’s also about 13% in the elite, long distance runners. So if you’re doing a heap, a lot, a lot of running, then you probably will have a heightened risk of arthritis in your knees. However, the good news is that some degree of running can actually be protective for your knees with arthritis. And as long as you don’t run too much, and too frequently, you’re probably not going to do yourself any harm.

There is also a topic that was covered from one of our friends at Waikato Podiatry here. This is Amanda Foster from Active Health, and it is the GLA:D programme. So this is an internationally based programme that uses exercise and certain types of exercise to reduce the need for surgical knee replacements in people with osteoarthritic knees. It’s very well evidenced, it has tens of thousands of subjects that have been through the GLA:D trial. And what it finds is that it can reduce the need to go on and have a knee replacement by around about 35%.

So that’s a significant drop. So if you need to find out any more information about the GLA:D programme, then give Amanda Foster from Active Health a call. The other thing that springs to mind with early arthritic knees is that often it’s a patellofemoral problem. So it could be another cause of pain in the arthritic knee. And that’s where the podiatrist can really help to diagnose where the actual pain is coming from to a certain extent and also give you some advice around footwear and where your time and money is best spent around trying to structure a really sound rehab programme.

Really important to get a specific diagnosis. A number of people that I’ve come across have been struggling with knee pain for several years, but never actually had a finite diagnosis of where the pain is coming from. And if you haven’t got that it’s really hard to structure a good treatment programme.

So give us a call if you’re having some knee pain and we can certainly help.

Suffering from Creaky Knees?

Are you are feeling like you have tried everything but are still suffering from creaky knees and knee pain?
Do you feel like you have seen every health practitioner you can about your creaky knees with no results?
We have a track record of diagnosing and successfully treating cases that have previously proven difficult to resolve and we’d love to help you get the problem sorted.