My physical therapist, a very attractive Eastern European woman with bleached blonde hair and the impressive physique of a fitness model, had a Sarah Palin moment right at the start of my first visit interview. She asked me what was wrong. I responded that I had had a medial plica excision last week, and my orthopedist wanted me to get some physical therapy.

She blinked for several seconds. “Medial… what?” she asked.

“Plica,” I replied. “Excision.”

She continued to stare at me blankly.

I don’t expect everyone to know what a plica is. After all, I know lots of stuff, but I didn’t know a plica from a condyle before all of this business with my knee.

But I did find it a little bit silly to have to explain it all to a career physical therapist. After all, plica problems are not rare in athletic people. My rather detailed explanation did nothing to erase the Palinesque expression from her face.

She then performed some strength and flexibility tests on me. One of them involved getting me to relax my leg, then pulling it straight such that gravity dropped the knee into a state of hyperextension. I have a very high tolerance for pain, but that move made me gasp and shout, “Ow!”. She tried to explain the moment away as a “test”. That just convinced me that she didn’t know what she was doing. It’s the kind of thing that (it seems to me) you just shouldn’t test on a knee which underwent an operation just last week, especially since we’d already established that putting the knee into full extension was still somewhat painful for me.

Then, she gave me some basic exercises (leg lifts, isometric stuff) to do at home until my next visit–exercises which I can already perform with ease, some of which I know for a fact have nothing to do with working my knee. Then it was a “Thank you very much. Leave your co-pay with the receptionist”.

I’m trying to be open-minded and patient. Deep down inside, though, I kind of think that a decade of weight training, martial arts, and never-ending inquiry into the latest developments in sports science research might just trump the knowledge of the average physical therapist. I had a crappy experience at the last place, and this place, though much more upscale, and with claims of being sports-rehab-oriented, seems no better so far.

I honestly think that I would do better rehabilitating myself. It would be cheaper, and I could fit it in to my schedule at my convenience. I also have a deep understanding of the kinds of activities to which I aspire to return, whereas I’m finding that most PTs have no idea what goes into traditional martial arts study and the types of resistance training that complement it.

My doc says that I can push myself without worrying about hurting anything in my knee and that I’m free to return to normal activities within my pain threshold. So I’m convinced that PT is a waste of my time and money. Am I just being a know-it-all snob?

I will probably go to a few more sessions, just to see whether the experience improves. And I will ask for a different therapist. But in October, my co-pay for these sessions goes from $30.00 each to $50.00 each. At that point, unless I’m learning something new, I think I’ll go it alone.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 and is filed under Fixing the Knee. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.