Free Saving My Knees: How I Proved My Doctors Wrong and Beat Chronic Knee Pain by Richard Bedard

couldn’t help me construct a program of light walking; he didn’t understand (or care to) why that worked better than anything he proposed. He never bothered to explore why two weeks in Tibet brought me some success when everything else failed.
    Among his greater and lesser shortcomings, one thing I couldn’t forgive him for: giving up on me. For months he counseled against surgery and urged me to be patient. Then, one day, he caved in. He had tried to help me but couldn’t, so he dropped his opposition to arthroscopic surgery. The operation would snip away frayed cartilage and flush out any tissue fragments floating around the joints.
    Fortunately, I was enlightened enough at that point to realize that surgery wasn’t the answer. I wasn’t finding many happy stories online from patients who had undergone arthroscopies.
    Leaving my physical therapist felt like the right move, but I faced an enormous problem. Four doctors couldn’t help me. Two physical therapists didn’t have any good answers either. How was I going to get better?
    My options were running out. It seemed that there was only one person with the motivation and desire to think deeply about what was going on with my knees and try to figure a way out of this maze of pain and frustration. Like it or not, that was me.

6   The Puzzle
     
    There is a story about how the prolific American humorist James Thurber, unable to leave his work behind, would get lost in thought at inappropriate times. His wife would spy him across the room at a party, wearing a familiar distracted expression. She would go up and admonish him: “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.”
    My wife’s line to me would probably be, “Stop thinking.” I tend to ponder and analyze things to an irritating degree. Congyu is more intuitive and spiritual. She’s Chinese and places more faith in the vicissitudes of good fortune and in lucky numbers, such as “eight.” She chose the date for our marriage: 8/8/08.
    It didn’t take long for us to clash when I began trying to solve the puzzle of my hurting knees. She empathized: a left knee had bothered her since the age of nineteen. (Her doctors too appraised the joint as “normal.” I carefully listened to her bend it and, sure enough, heard the telltale crackling of rough cartilage.) Her way of coping involved a mixture of resigned acceptance and experiments with Chinese medicine. One day she presented me with a bag of what looked like candies and the argument soon followed.
    “Where did these come from?” I said. They turned out to be pieces of chewable medicine, individually wrapped in silver foil, that were supposed to help me heal.
    “Taiwan,” she replied cautiously, sensing my resistance.
    “What’s in them?”
    “I don’t know,” she huffed, as if my question were prima facie absurd.
    “How do you know if they’re any good then?”
    “This medicine has been around for many, many generations,” she said.
    After a few more minutes, it became clear we were sliding out onto that dangerous ledge where one false step would plunge us over the edge into a nasty spat. Finally I shrugged and offered to try the stuff. It was actually tasty, with a molasses flavor. Over the next few weeks I polished off the entire bag. My knees felt the same though.
    So I added Chinese medicine to the long list of things that didn’t work for me. It didn’t matter. The inescapable truth was that figuring out how to save my knees would be hard. That meant I needed to be open-minded and flexible. Even though I wasn’t always the smartest guy in the room, flexible thinking was fortunately one of my strengths.
    I started out by turning to the Internet, that noisy bazaar of ideas. I knew that the Net, when used wisely, can empower patients. A discriminating consumer can sample from a smorgasbord of high-quality information. For instance, a standard Google search now includes published books. A Google Scholar search homes in on the latest peer-reviewed