This week my clinical experience was pretty exciting. I was able to clinical for a basketball game as well as some practices and just some treatment/rehab time. On the day that I was able to do the general treatment and rehab time slots, I was able to complete 2 evaluations. One of them really stuck out to me just from the results and the diagnosis that I was able to formulate from my examination findings. The athlete came into the clinic with knee pain that was pretty severe at times, especially when running. The athlete reported that they felt their knee pop while kicking a soccer ball, and that they had felt this same pop with pain a couple weeks before while doing a specific stretching exercise (crossover knee pull). During my evaluation the athlete had noticeable but minor deficits in active knee flexion range of motion, but showed equal strength in all knee ranges of motion with slight pain during knee extension. The athlete’s pain was located just under the medial patellar tendon. Due to the location of pain, and the athlete reporting that the pain felt like it was coming from deep in their knee, I was generally worried about the meniscus or the ACL having suffered damage. After a battery of tests, I determined that it was neither the ACL nor the meniscus, and kept doing other tests for the MCL as well as the LCL, without getting any positive tests. I then went back and did more palpations on both knees without finding any differences in actual palpations, but finding a location that seemed to elicit pain, right over the medial patellar tendon. At this point I was kind of stumped, mostly due to the athlete’s mechanism and their report of where their pain was located. I called over Chaypin to look over the things I had done, and do some special tests of her own just to see what we thought. After we briefly talked about my findings compared to hers, we came up with a diagnosis of patellar tendonitis. This evaluation really reminded me that I always have to keep an open mind about whatever I am evaluating. Even though the athlete could be reporting pain in a slightly different location that where the injury has occurred, I need to keep in mind that the athletes perception of pain location could be somewhat flawed, due to multiple factors. The athlete has been doing rehabilitation for the patellar tendonitis and is showing signs of improved pain levels, so at this point it looks like I have done a pretty good job with the evaluation and diagnosis of this athlete’s injury.
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AuthorCarson Bryant Archives
April 2018
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