Can your replacement surgery actually cause a leg length discrepancy? Many people feel that they have a leg length discrepancy after having a knee replacement surgery because they just feel off in their knee. Some even attribute chronic pain in other body parts to a living discrepancy from their knee replacement surgery, they’ll get pain in places like their hip, their low back, or even their ankle and foot and of course, the opposite knee.

But not many healthcare professionals talk about leg length discrepancy. And some don’t even believe that it’s a real thing. It’s been studied in medical research that leg length discrepancy is a thing that happens after having a knee replacement surgery. However, measuring it is controversial because there’s different methods and they’re not all consistent.

Currently, the gold standard is getting an x ray, where they’ll measure the length of the bones so that you can determine if you truly have a leg length discrepancy. There are many health care professionals out there that can measure your leg length without an x ray, by looking at the alignment of your bones.

This requires lots of experience and lots of training in order to effectively do it. And as a practitioner that does it myself, I can tell you that I feel confident to determining if somebody has a leg length problem and in treating it of course, but this is a skill that’s learned with 1000s and 1000s of reps and does require mentorship. In order to get good at it.

I strongly recommend that you find a health care professional that’s trained as a manual therapists like I am in order to get an accurate measurement from a healthcare professional and combine that with an X ray so that you can make a determination if you truly have a leg length discrepancy.

This can get confusing because it is possible to have a negative X ray meaning you don’t have a leg length discrepancy. Yet a medical professional might find that you do have a leg length discrepancy. And the reason for that is because it could be coming from other body parts a leg length discrepancy can be caused from problems up in the lower back the hip or even the ankles.

But that’s good news if you have that situation because that means that your surgery is not the cause of the leg length problem. Now if you do have a leg length problem, what should you do about it, the first thing to do is reset your expectations because like I said, it could be that it’s not the surgery causing the leg length discrepancy, which puts you in a good position to fix it.

Because you may just need to work on muscles strength in certain areas on joint mobility. There’s things that are in your control, very likely that can affect your leg length to normalize it. Realize also that it’s possible that you had a leg length discrepancy before surgery.

And because of the effects of surgery of going through, you know being cut on having your joints opened, having muscles get weaker after surgery not being as active as you normally might have been before.

All of that can contribute to your prior leg length discrepancy becoming worse after the surgery, but not necessarily because of the changes in the bone structure of the joints that the surgeon puts you through in order to install the prosthetic parts to replace your knee joint.

Some options to treat a leg length discrepancy are using insoles within your shoes to adjust for the height using a cane in order to offload a problematic area, something that’s causing you pain and fixing the muscle imbalances is one of my go to fixes because it’s usually a strength problem that’s contributing to leg length issues that are within your control.

I talk extensively about how to help chronic pain and other problems related to a knee replacement on this channel, you can check out our playlist called knee replacement help. There’s a link for that down in the description below. And they’ve also got a program to help people suffering from chronic pain after knee replacement. And that’s called the failed knee replacement recovery program.

There’s a link for that down in the description here below. If this information was helpful for you, please give us a thumbs up and please share this with somebody that you think needs to hear this. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and turn on our notification bell so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos we post each and every week. Thanks so much for watching. I’ll see you in the next video. Bye bye!

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