Saving My Knees: How I Proved My Doctors Wrong and Beat Chronic Knee Pain by Richard Bedard Read Free Book Online Page A

of being in a managed care network that tries to control costs while keeping its clients (companies like mine) happy.
    Orthopedist number four, my last-ditch effort, was Dr. Lin. By then I was at the end of my rope. I’m not quite sure what I expected entering his office on a Friday at mid-afternoon. I clutched a typed-up summary sheet that listed my symptoms and history. By then I carried a lot of baggage and wanted to be efficient. It was probably good that my expectations were low.
    An empty waiting room greeted me (it was also empty when I left). A wariness began tingling in my frontal lobes. As I settled into a well-cushioned seat, his secretary pleasantly informed me that the cost of the appointment included five days of free pills. At that point, the prescription itself seemed like a mere formality. It was coming. The handwriting was on the wall.
    Dr. Lin was a bluff, hearty Asian with a bushy mustache. He had a garrulous manner, as if we were two guys having a beer after work. I handed him my summary, babbled for a while, then told him I was dedicated to getting better. He inquired about my age. He never asked to see the MRI or X-ray images I brought. He never examined my knees. He never so much as asked me to hike up my pant legs so he could take a gander from across the room, just to make sure there wasn’t a rod sticking out of them sideways.
    After five minutes during which I did most of the talking, he proclaimed loudly, “You have arthritis!” I frowned, confused. Old people who had a lot of joint stiffness and problems moving about had arthritis. That wasn’t me, not yet. He waved aside all my points, including the chondromalacia discovered by the MRI.
    His assessment came down to this: “You’re forty-six, your body is going to go downhill, you just need to accept that, and you have arthritis.”
    Dr. Lin didn’t have pills for chondromalacia, but he sure did for arthritis. I left with ten pink tablets and ten white tablets to counteract the effect on my stomach of the pink ones. He no doubt made a mental note to expect me back in another week or so, looking for another fix.
    Curious, I returned to Dr. Chiu the following week. He actually did look at my knees. In response to my question, he said flatly, “No, you don’t have arthritis.” He did leave open the possibility that I would in several years if my joints kept deteriorating.
    The conflicting diagnoses left me pondering the word “arthritis.” True, it literally does mean joint inflammation. Such a simple definition misses a lot though. If a seventeen-year-old complains of inflamed knees because he stupidly trained too little then ran a marathon, it’s doubtful a doctor will call the condition arthritis.
    A better definition (for osteoarthritis anyway) is “a degenerative joint disease that includes structural changes, such as bone spurs.” Osteoarthritis appeared to be the relevant variety for me, as my joints weren’t tender or swollen, as they normally would be for other forms such as rheumatoid arthritis. Dr. Lin had no idea whether I had bone spurs or swelling even; after all, he never looked at my knees.
    What he probably did was put me in a box. He asked my age, then in his mind he went down a decision tree—chronic joint inflammation, over forty—and he arrived at the conclusion “arthritis.”
    I would encounter that box again and again. It’s a small, bleak box with no windows. You’re often put in that box when you’re older. If you’re young, you’ll heal. You have hope. If you’re older, you’ll never get better and should bear your pain with stoicism and quiet despair. In other words, start shopping for the lining of your coffin.
    That I wasn’t getting better seemed to warrant pessimism. But the doctors consistently ignored a point I made repeatedly, until it felt like I was shouting at the deaf. My job required ten hours a day at a desk, but I couldn’t sit! That position caused my knees to burn, which