Joint imbalance and bone spurs, closed adjustment to remove the pain of the disease After middle age, bone joints begin to age, there will be osteophytes, commonly known as “bone spurs”. But why do they grow in some places and not in others, and why do they grow more in some places and less in others? This is largely due to an imbalance in the body’s mechanical balance. The human body is subject to various forces, the skeleton is the pillar of the body, subject to the most significant force . Usually there are three forms of mechanical expression in the human body – compressive stress, tensile stress and upward stress. For example, the joint surface of the knee joint is subjected to the squeezing force of the body’s weight, i.e. compressive stress. The ligaments on both sides of the knee joint are under a certain amount of tension to keep the joint stable, i.e., tensile stress. The wall of a blood vessel is subjected to an inward and outward force from the blood inside the wall, called an upward stress. Upward stress is not very important in bone joints. Under normal conditions, these three stresses play an extremely important role in human life activities and are in relative balance. However, for some reason, this normal stress leveling is disrupted, and when the internal stress is below the normal range, the metabolism of the area is sluggish, the function is weakened, and the structure is atrophied. Where the stress is too high, the tissue cells are damaged. In the case of the bone joints, the areas that are subjected to excessive stress, bone and cartilage cells are damaged and fibrous tissues are broken. The body mobilizes multiple factors to resist this abnormal stress in order to strengthen the tissue structure at the site of high stress so that the abnormally high stress cannot continue to cause damage to the tissue structure at that site. In the case of bone joints, the fibrous tissue proliferates, calcifies and ossifies at the site of high stress. Bone spurs are thus formed. The knee joint is a good site for osteophytes because it has to carry the weight of the whole body and is prone to injury because it moves a lot. If you have a slightly misshapen knee joint or have suffered a more serious injury, the bone spur will develop early and severely, even affecting your life and work because of pain and dysfunction. If you pay attention, there is a certain pattern of bone growth in the knee joint. You straighten both knees and lean them against each other. If the two ankles are already close together and there is a large gap between the two knees, it means that your knee is inwardly turned sagittal, the medial joint space is under greater force than the lateral space, and it often comes with an inward shift of the patella, and when the knee is flexed and extended, the friction between the medial patella and the medial femoral condyle is greater than the lateral side. If you have knee pain due to osteophytes, the pain is mostly on the medial side of the knee and the inferior or superior medial corner of the patella. Conversely if, on examination, your knees are close together and the gap between the two ankles is larger, this means that your knee is in an external sigmoid shape, the force on the lateral gap of the knee is greater than the medial gap, and the patellar band is displaced outward, increasing friction with the articular surface of the lateral femoral condyle. Thus, if you have knee pain due to osteophytes, the pain is often in the lateral space of the knee and the lower or upper outer corner of the patella. You may say, “I have had a deformed knee for many years, why does it hurt now when it did not hurt before? The human body is a living organism and has the ability to repair itself. This ability to repair is stronger when you are young and gradually decreases with age, which is why strain-related diseases gradually increase as people pass middle age. There is a limit to the body’s ability to repair and adjust. When osteophytes reach a certain level, it will significantly increase the frictional force of joint activities, and too much friction will produce damage, causing sterile inflammation and pain and dysfunction. Inflammation can in turn stimulate osteophytes, which in turn increase friction, forming a vicious circle, resulting in long-term knee pain that is not removed and gradually worsens. Numerous anti-inflammatory and analgesic drugs can eliminate the pain for a while, but the effect is not good and it is easy to relapse. The root cause is the failure to correct the imbalance of forces in the knee joint. If the force balance can be restored, not only can the damage be stopped, thus eliminating pain and improving function, but the cause of the osteophytes – excessive stress and inflammatory stimulation – can be removed, and the further development of osteophytes can be controlled, which is considered a cure. The medical community has been exploring this cure in many ways. In the past, a drastic orthopedic surgery was often used, such as for inversion of the knee, the upper end of the tibia was truncated and a triangular bone block with the bottom edge on the outside was cut off, the lower leg was turned out, the plate was fixed, and the patellar ligament was cut off at the attachment point of the tibia and shifted outward and fixed to correct the line of force. The recovery time after surgery is usually 3-6 months, and the pain of surgery can be imagined. At the same time, since the human joint surface is irregularly shaped, correcting the imbalance of this aspect often leads to the imbalance of the other aspect, so the postoperative time is generally satisfactory only about 5 years, therefore it is not widely promoted. Is there a more suitable method? Needle knife closure and release adjustment should be the better treatment method at present. The small needle knife is about 1 mm in diameter and has a blade at the tip, which is only equivalent to a thick needle. The knee joint is carefully examined to identify local high stress zones and high friction points of osteophytes, and the over-stressed ligaments are cut and loosened under local anesthesia by stabbing into the skin; the bone spurs that affect the joint movement and rub too much are shoveled and trimmed, and then the stress balance of the knee joint is restored to normal with manipulation. The pain disappears, function is restored, and the osteophytes stop growing and can even gradually shrink. The needle knife can also release the synovial membrane embedded in the joint space, eliminating synovitis and reducing pain. It can also treat the bone surface after the articular cartilage has been stripped, so that the cartilage can be repaired more smoothly.