One of our goals with this website is to help you understand why you might be having nerve pain and how we can potentially improve the situation for you. We understand that nerve pain is an incredibly frustrating situation—one that can keep you from the things you want to do in life, along with making what you need to do a miserable experience.
That’s already frustrating enough as is, but the frustration is (understandably) ramped up when you’ve undergone a procedure that was supposed to take away your pain or restore function.
To help you have a more comprehensive understanding of this issue, we have created a whitepaper—and are happy to provide it to you at absolutely no cost!
Please click here to receive your complimentary copy of “Chronic Nerve Pain Following Knee Surgery – For Sports Injuries, Knee Replacements, or Other Procedures.”
Why does chronic nerve pain happen after surgery?
Nerve pain following surgery can be a problem in many different areas of the body. We help patients who have had surgeries in ankles, hips, and upper extremities—only to end up with chronic pain.
When that happens, it’s easy to wonder why it’s happening or if there was something your surgeon had done incorrectly during the procedure.
Now, before you start attributing your chronic nerve pain after knee surgery is a sign of incompetence on behalf of your surgeon, something to keep in mind is this:
Surgeons do the best they can in situations that are sometimes remarkably complicated.
Our bodies are complex structures featuring an astounding number of moving parts—and this is something we can say when everything’s fine and performing as intended! When an injury or troublesome condition is present, that picture becomes much more complicated.
For example, an internal injury to a joint as valuable and commonly used as a knee requires a surgeon to cut through several layers of body tissue to reach the injury site. There’s an inherent risk of inadvertently severing a nerve in doing so.
That being said, your surgeon likely took every precaution in the book to prevent this from happening. The problem is, sometimes it’s simply an unavoidable situation.
You have peripheral nerves running throughout your entire body, which results in a network that is necessary so your central nervous system—your brain and spinal column—can effectively communicate with all the other parts of your body.
We need these nerves for both movement and sensory purposes. Unfortunately, this means the peripheral nervous system is quite vast. It can be next-to-impossible for even the world’s best surgeon to completely avoid the nerves in certain situations.
Areas where it can be especially tricky to avoid nerves are in knee repair and replacement. At the same time, these tend to be fairly common procedures.
Some postsurgical pain is actually normal…but not all!
Before we move forward, we need to note something important:
No matter the surgery, you will likely have at least a certain degree of pain and soreness afterward and during the recovery period. This makes sense when you consider the fact that surgery is actually “planned physical trauma.”
As we mentioned, surgeons need to cut through body tissues to reach an injury site. It will take your body time to recover from this, and that is completely normal.
What isn’t normal is pain that is chronic—lasting six months or longer following the procedures—or neuropathic (nerve-related) in nature. You should expect typical post-operative pain to subside within a couple of months after the surgery. If you’ve hit the six-month mark and are still having pain, it’s entirely possible a nerve was injured during the procedure itself.
Your first step in determining the problem is to have your treating physician or surgeon reexamine the affected knee. You will learn if everything appears to be normal from a structural context, including making sure any hardware was installed correctly, there are no signs of infection, the injured site has healed in a normal manner (from an orthopedic perspective), etc.
You will probably even want to get a second opinion, just to be sure.
In the event you are having severe pain outside of a typical recovery period and the appropriate medical professionals are assuring you everything looks as it should, there’s a high probability the problem is neuropathic.
So what might have happened to the affected nerves? After all, this pain wasn’t always there, right?
Every case is a bit different, but it is possible nerve tissue was injured during the procedure itself or had become entrapped in scar tissue during the recovery phase. There is also the chance that hardened scar tissue now presses against a nerve (compression).
Injury, entrapment, and compression all can lead to symptoms such as:
- Burning, tingling, and “pins and needles” sensations
- Pain in a surgical scar or the surrounding area
- Inability to kneel without pain
- Intense pain from contact with objects (even light ones)
Those are just a couple of symptoms you might experience. For a more comprehensive list, get your free copy of “Chronic Nerve Pain Following Knee Surgery – For Sports Injuries, Knee Replacements, or Other Procedures” today!
Neuropathic issues such as chronic pain following knee surgery need to be addressed. When they aren’t, the severe pain will persist and you risk the problem worsening over time and/or potentially becoming permanent.
Finding relief from chronic, neuropathic pain after surgery
That may sound rather dire, but there is hope:
We have techniques that might be able to help your situation.
How do we know that? Because we’ve helped other patients find relief from severe, chronic pain following knee surgeries—and there’s a chance we can do the same for you!
Our understanding of how frustrating this situation can be coming from years of experience treating patients for nerve pain following surgeries that were supposed to make things better. This is why we’ve created a whitepaper covering this subject. We want you to know more about what might be happening and, perhaps even more importantly, what we may be able to do to find you relief.
When you come in to see us, we’ll start with a careful medical evaluation and diagnosis as we work to establish the core issue. As part of this, we take the time to listen to you as you describe your symptoms, let us know what happened—both with regards to your surgery and why you had one in the first place—and share any potential concerns.
With this information, we can start to determine if there is anything we can do for you, and which specific procedures might be best used to resolve the problem.
If you are still having pain following surgery for knee injury, and the knee has been reevaluated by appropriate medical professionals, you should contact us for a consultation. You should also see us if you’ve been injured and had conservative treatment that should have worked, but still have severe and chronic neuropathic pain.
Together, we can discuss your situation and start working on a plan to resolve it. If you are worried that you are going to need surgery, it’s important that you know we are happy to provide recommendations for nonsurgical options (if we feel they could be beneficial to you). So there’s no need to worry about that!
The important thing is this:
You have a painful, frustrating problem and we will do everything within our power to help you find the relief you need.
For more information on this issue, you may want to take a moment to get your copy of “Chronic Nerve Pain Following Knee Surgery – For Sports Injuries, Knee Replacements, or Other Procedures.” And if you are in pain and would like to request a consultation with our Baltimore office, simply give us a call at (410) 709-3868 and one of our staff members will be happy to assist you.
