Your Treatment Options for a Meniscus Tear in Your Knee

Your knees are the largest joints in your body and play no small role in how you move around. So, when you’re hobbled by a knee issue like a meniscus tear, you want to get to the other side as quickly as possible.

While meniscus tears are among the most common sports injuries, they can affect the active and inactive alike. For example, meniscus tears are tied to osteoarthritis in the knee, which occurs more in older populations. In total, there are about 850,000 meniscus tears each year in the United States, sending scores of people to orthopedists for help.

At SOAR Spine and Orthopedics, our team of musculoskeletal experts has seen its fair share of knee injuries and meniscus tears are among the more common. What this means for you is that we’re well-versed in addressing a meniscus tear, which we describe below.

Assessing the meniscus tear

Each of your knees has two menisci, which are wedge-shaped pieces of cartilage that act as shock absorbers between your tibia and femur, transferring weight from one bone to the other.

When you have an issue with this soft tissue, our first order of business is to evaluate the extent of the tear, which dictates our treatment recommendations.

The reason why the size and location of the tear is crucial is because the meniscus has two different zones:

• Red zone — the outer third of the tissue that contains a good blood supply
• White zone — the inner two-thirds of the meniscus, which is devoid of blood

Practically speaking, a tear in the red zone can heal more readily since it has access to healing resources through your blood. A tear that reaches into the inner two-thirds, however, will not heal on its own without this critical supply source.

As a result, we may recommend surgery if there's a significant tear that reaches into the white zone, as opposed to more conservative treatments that support red zone tears.

Your lifestyle matters

Another factor that should dictate your treatment is your lifestyle. For example, if you’re on the younger side and you enjoy an active lifestyle, having us surgically repair your meniscus tear can make good sense since you want a knee that can keep up with you.

If, however, you’re 85 and you’ve developed a meniscus tear due to wear and tear and your more active days are behind you, we may recommend conservative treatments, such as knee bracing and physical therapy.

Treating your meniscus tear

In most cases, we recommend a combination of treatments for meniscus tears and we often start conservatively with:

• Rest and activity modification
• Icing therapies
• Bracing
• Cortisone injections

If these therapies prove ineffective, and your meniscus tear is still bothering you, it may be time to explore surgical repair with our team of highly skilled orthopedic surgeons.

Whether you have surgery or not, we also highly recommend supportive treatments, including physical therapy and individualized exercise instruction to build strength in your knee and preserve range of motion. 

We’ve also found that regenerative medicine, such as platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections, can play an invaluable role in delivering healing resources to your meniscus. We can turn to PRP injections as part of a conservative treatment plan or a surgical one.

Each of our patients has their own objectives and lifestyle considerations, so it’s impossible to say here what might work best for your meniscus tear. 

The best way to do that is to sit with one of our orthopedists. To put that in motion, contact us at one of our offices in Santa Clara or Redwood City, California, office today.