Interviewer: Is there anything we can say about the Yale Medicine approach that’s exciting?
0:12:36.3
Karen: At Yale Medicine, we do offer a multidisciplinary approach to treating and preventing ACL injury. As surgeons, we can reconstruct the ACL, but then I consider it 50% what we do as surgeons and then 50% what the athletes do. We’re very privileged to work with some excellent physical therapists, athletic trainers, strength and conditioners, as well as nutritionists that can get our athlete back …show more content…
The first aspect is before the athlete even goes into surgery, we work with a physical therapist to regain range of motion of the knee. The knee tends to get really stiff and swollen after experiencing an injury, and before we do surgery, we actually need that knee to be mobile again. Our physical therapists help us to get that athlete moving their knee, also engaging their quadriceps, muscles, so that the knee is extremely strong before surgery. The better we can make the knee before surgery increases a better outcome. Do you want me to go into after surgery or is that enough, …show more content…
If we move the patella, or the kneecap over, we can see the inside of the knee and as we open up the knee, we can see the thigh bone, or the femur, and this is the bottom portion of the femur and the upper portion of the tibia, or the shinbone. The ACL connects the front aspect of the tibia to the back aspect of the thigh bone, or the femur. It runs in the front of the knee and crosses in front of the PCL, or the posterior cruciate ligament. That’s why they’re called cruciate ligaments, is because they form a cross in the middle of the knee. I mean I was a little futzing with the model, but I don’t know if that matters.
Interviewer: Is there anything else that we have said throughout our interview that we can apply to the model?
0:22:51.5
Karen: Yeah, I can show where we do the surgery and stuff like that. In surgery, we end up drilling a tunnel through the tibia on the inside of the tibia and then another tunnel is drilled on the outside of the femur. At that point, we then weave some type of graft in there including either a patella tendon, a hamstring graft, and then that takes the place of this ACL, which is located in the front of the