Finally, probably a year later, where i had gone to get another opinion once, but mostly had quit trying with dr opinions, a guy at work told me about prolotherapy. naturopathy sounded nuts, but i was willing to try anything.
This guy actually sat down and had an hour long conversation with me. First guy who did that. I had read tons and he answered and confirmed a lot of my guesses, while also telling me how everything he was going to do worked, in theory.
The patellar tendon attaches bone to muscle. The tendon itself is very hard with very little blood flow. He said my body would heal itself to a certain point where it was functional but then lose focus on that area because it is a big ‘effort’ to get blood cells there. It had to be reinjured to bring back the focus, but not so much as to do more damage, as tendonosis is the deconstruction of the tendon being done at a rate higher than it can be fixed. you are already deep in the hole, you dont want to go further.
He was going to inject sugarwater into my knee. The sugar and the needle itself aggravate the area so the body will respond. the water i think softens the tendon a bit for blood flow. (This is ten years ago, so i may be getting some finer points wrong).
All he did to find out where to inject was push on my tendon until i reacted in pain. He drew a dot there, injection site. did about ten in total. Hurt like fuck that first time. Just a small gauge needle, sugarwater. crazy, i thought.
in about a week, i had, no mental tricks, healed past anywhere i had felt in the last year and a half. it actually, for real, felt better. But far from perfect.
Naturopathy was NOT covered by work and it was costing me $200 to get this done. but i went back for more maybe two weeks after the first injections.
I had read a lot about prolo now, and i asked him, “the first dr. said to just take three weeks off. Is that because i train harder than most 35 yr olds and she is used to seeing this injury in 20yr olds, who have enough natural HGH to recover properly?” He said yes.
I asked if there was a point or any dangers to injecting hgh into the knee.
He said that he has colleagues who do just that, but the shots are very expensive. I thought that if he was charging me $200 for sugarwater that i didnt even want to ask about hgh.
He did another series of shots that day (which also made improvements), but while he was out of the room, i grabbed a needle so that i would know the gauge.
I went to the guy who deals steroids at work, he happened to be doing HGH and i just got a couple of vials (i dont even remember what they come in. anyways, it wasnt a signficant part of a cycle.... i feel like there are ten vials in a kit, many kits in a cycle but this isnt my forte...and i used three vials, maybe four)
i got the same needles, and did my own injections at 5am so id be groggy. pressing to find the most painful spot. two injection sites each time, one vial. once a week.
four weeks later (so it mustve been 4 vials), after nearly two years of hopelessness, i was totally better, and able to start bodyweight squatting and cycling to strengthen the area. in fact, i eased into strengthening probably after two weeks. i felt completely normal after maybe two more months of ramping back to normal training.
hope this helps.
hopefully you are still just in the tendonitis stage and just need to buck up and stop training (which is hard to do), but for anyone else, this helped my life so much, and ive been good for ten years. I felt the same pain two years ago. Laid off of running and squats for a month and it got better. Getting better at listening to my body.
