@corycalendinemd: PCL Tears: How This Knee Injury Hides in Plain Sight Your posterior cruciate ligament is the strongest ligament in your knee, and the one missed most often. It sits deep in the back of the joint and keeps your shinbone from sliding backward under your thighbone. Roughly 1/3 larger than the ACL and built from (2) bundles that share the load at every angle of bend, it is the quiet workhorse of the knee. You feel it most going down stairs, down hills, and decelerating. Here is how it can slip past us. Unlike an ACL tear, a #PCLinjury often comes with no pop and minimal swelling - many athletes finish the game. The pain can show-up a week or two later, at the front of the knee, and by then the story has faded. Classic mechanisms include a dashboard striking a bent knee or a fall onto a flexed knee with the foot pointed down. Diagnosis is part physical exam, part imaging. Gravity gives it away first, the shin sagging back when the knee is bent to ninety degrees. MRI is excellent for a fresh tear but can look deceptively normal in a chronic one, which is why kneeling stress x-rays, measuring the backward slide in millimeters side to side, have become the number that drives the decision. . Most isolated tears never see a scalpel. Grade I-=II injuries, and many stable grade III, heal with a dynamic brace + dedicated quad work - your PCL can heal. The question is whether it heals in the right place, or loose. When we do operate, it is usually for combined injuries, bony avulsions, or instability that failed rehab, and we save every strand of the old ligament we can before the graft does the rest. If your knee has never felt right since an impact, it might be worth a check - easy to overlook, worth finding. . What procedure did the patient in the 5th slide (kneeling x-ray) have previously? SHARE your #kneeinjury experience & insights #orthopedicsurgery

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Thursday 03 September 2026 00:28:47 GMT