I recently joined Dan Braun on the Brawn Body Health and Fitness podcast. We talked about patellar tracking abnormalities and patellar instability. So first of all, the patella is the kneecap – and a lot of people start having patellar pain when they’re teenagers. It’s a little more common in girls, and they’re often told that the pain is normal or perhaps to avoid a specific sport. Far less often, they’re actually evaluated. However, there are a lot of different causes of anterior knee pain – not all anterior knee pain is patellar femoral pain syndrome.
In some cases, physical therapy or even off the shelf shoe inserts can really help. Sometimes we need to take a deeper dive, an x-ray, or even an MRI.