Knee Pain, where do we start?

A clinical case study to help improve your clinical reasoning, recognise serious pathology and improve rehabilitation plans.

This weekly newsletter will be a re-cap of a clinical case study to give you food for thought and most importantly help improve your clinical reasoning, recognise serious pathology and consider your next steps in terms of patient management and rehabilitation.

Clinical Case Study

For this weeks case study, we initially don't have much information to go by, this is where critical thinking and clinical knowledge from pattern recognition is essential to improve our clinical autonomy. Your referral paperwork only gives you following information "69 year old with pain in the right knee ?Osteoarthritis." Now this may be a patient you're likely to see in the emergency department and is probably the main reason why I continue to enjoy being a physio for the sheer satisfaction that we now have to do some problem solving to aid the patient in front of us.

X-ray showing knee from multiple views with lesion infiltrating the femur

Key takeaway: REPLACE: What is the most obvious injury that I observe on the X-RAY?

Food for thought

I also want you to think about the following questions:

Do I need to ask any further questions to the patient who is sat in front of me to further clarify their symptoms?
What are my next steps in this situation to help the person in front of me?

These case studies aim to improve your clinical expertise, assessment, management and rehabilition skills, so every week we'll run through a new clinical case study like the one above, with a summary of the previous case.

The "5 steps to MSK X-RAY interpretation" will be going live in June and I hope you've found the above useful.

Knee pain, where do we start?

Clinical Case Study

Food for thought

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