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

articles in medical journals.
    I knew too that useful ideas on the Net sometimes pop up in unexpected places. The reason I knew this was because a rather unusual Web site helped me once during a long battle with a plantar wart.
    The name sounds nasty, but plantar warts are often small and benign looking. One took up residence on the side of my right foot while I was living in South Florida. I ignored it, hoping it would go away. Instead the wart got bigger.
    I had a bad premonition that getting rid of it wouldn’t be fun. A podiatrist gave me a foretaste of things to come when he blithely said, “I’m going to burn a hole in your foot.” He used a scalpel to whittle away dead skin in the area, going as deep as I could tolerate. Then he packed a chemical called Cantharone into the hole, as if it was slow-fuse dynamite.
    He bandaged the end of my foot and told me not to wash out the Cantharone (a blistering solution) for a few days, unless the pain became intolerable. After that I returned to the newspaper office where I worked and the intense burning began. I gritted my teeth and hobbled about for several days, then off came the bandages. After a series of Cantharone applications, the podiatrist wished me luck and gradually the area healed up.
    Then the wart came back. He repeated the treatment. And it came back again.
    At this point I asked the logical question: what next? He somberly informed me that the options didn’t look good. Surgery wasn’t desirable because scar tissue might form on the bottom of my foot. Walking then might become uncomfortable with each step I took. Also the surgery might not get rid of the wart for good anyway.
    Desperate, I began chasing hyperlinks through cyberspace, trying to find an alternative. When it comes to warts, it seems as if everybody has some kind of home remedy. Most didn’t make much sense to me.
    Then I stumbled across a very interesting Web page. Some guy left detailed instructions on how he vanquished a plantar wart using sulfur soap, sulfur powder, and generous strips of duct tape. What’s more, he posted before-and-after photos that showed his skin looking perfectly healed.
    That intrigued me. Sulfur soap wasn’t readily available in my neighborhood. I did have an over-the-counter medication called DuoFilm. By itself, it proved pretty useless against the wart. But what about in combination with duct tape?
    I remember feeling incredibly foolish the first morning of the experiment. I dabbed some DuoFilm on my foot, stuck on a piece of duct tape from the local hardware store, then put on my dress shoes and went to work. Afterwards I replaced the tape daily.
    After a few days, the wart appeared to be shrinking. At first I thought it was only my imagination. Over several weeks, however, the improvement became impossible to deny. The wart was really going away. Then, one day, it was gone entirely.
    I got rid of it with duct tape ! My amazement spurred me to write a first-person account for the Sun-Sentinel . My podiatrist failed to root out the wart with painful applications of Cantharone. I beat it with a painless procedure that required no more than a sticky gray tape a handyman might use to mend a broken broom.
    The Internet helped me banish a pesky wart. I felt confident that it could shed some light on what to do about my knee problem. I visited many Web sites, discussion forums, and blogs. I looked for respectable sources, such as doctors and physical therapists.
    In my online browsing, once again I noticed an oddity. Some medical professionals use “chondromalacia patella” as a synonym for “patellofemoral pain syndrome,” while others clearly distinguish between the two. This time, instead of ignoring the confusion, I began to muse about what it signified.
    Remember that “patellofemoral pain syndrome” applies to a bucket of symptoms. You have the condition if you have enough of the symptoms (I had only half of them, but had diffuse pain around my kneecaps, so