Knee Denervation Helps Patient With Chronic Knee Pain
Quincy is a patient with a history of two different arthroscopic surgeries on the left knee for torn meniscus. He agreed to let us share his story in hopes of reaching other patients suffering from similar problems.
Knee Pain Gone Thanks to Surgery from Dr. Tollestrup.*
Last year Quincy started to notice some mild wasting of the right quadriceps muscle which was accompanied by recurrence of pain along the inside and front of the right knee. Repeat orthopedic evaluation did not find any reason for the pain. The pain became constant and would wake him up at night frequently, leaving him chronically fatigued.
Finally, he sought help from Dr. Tim Tollestrup, a peripheral nerve surgeon. Tollestrup performed a right anterior knee denervation procedure on Quincy. This is a surgery where Dr. Tollestrup locates and disconnects the injured or painful sensory nerves to the knee area. It’s like clipping an electrical wire and shuts off the pain signal to the patient’s brain. By the time Quincy came back to see Dr. Tollestrup in clinic for his one week post-op visit, his chronic right knee pain was completely gone!
Most of the knee denervation procedures Dr. Tollestrup does are on people who have already had a total knee arthroplasty and still experience debilitating nerve pain. This is a significant problem across the country for which orthopedic surgeons have no answer. In fact, in the journal “Pain”, from a group of 632 patients who had undergone a total knee arthroplasty, 44% reported experiencing persistent pain of any severity and 15% reported experiencing persistent pain of “severe to extreme” in severity.
There are approximately 700,000 total knee arthroplasties performed each year in the US. Some quick math reveals that just over 100,000 people a year are left with debilitating knee pain even after the entire arthritic knee joint is replaced! That’s 100,000 people every year which gives you some idea of the magnitude of the problem.
*Disclaimer
We do not guarantee any specific results or outcomes for surgery, should our practice work on your behalf. Information on this website may be used as a reference for successes we’ve achieved for our patients, and not as an assurance or guarantee for similar results in all instances.