Wondering if you should get ACL repair surgery right away or wait? Research shows that surgery is not always the solution and good news is I have non-surgical treatments that could help!
In today’s post, I will go over some recent ACL surgery research and what the results showed. And check out the video below to see how we can heal ACL tears without surgery!
Conclusion: Randomized control trial with 1 group getting early surgery and another group getting physical therapy first. Results showed that early surgery did not offer any advantage compared to first trying physical therapy and waiting for surgery. Furthermore, for those randomized to get PT first, 61% had enough improvement that they decided they did not need to go through surgery at all!
Conclusion: Following patients out 5 years, those that had early surgery had nearly double the amount of arthritis than those that did PT first and waited for surgery!
Based off of these studies, it is better to try physical therapy first before considering ACL repair surgery. A lot of people can actually avoid surgery completely, and those that eventually get surgery have less arthritis than those that get surgery right away!
And since we can HEAL many ACL tears with a minimally invasive injection procedure using a patient’s own stem cells (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/…/…/12967_2018_Article_1623.pdf), why not try that 1st?! Check out these before and after MRI videos!
Full thickness ACL tear recovery: https://youtu.be/gzE2QAYBMDY
This patient was a poor candidate for an ACL stem cell treatment, but we still had healing without surgery! https://youtu.be/y2UvKVX-1ms
What does an ACL injection look like? Check out my instagram post showing the ACL anatomy and my precise x-ray guided injection.