Joint Stability- Your Musculoskeletal Health.

Stability, Tensegrity, and Biotensegrity are key aspects of musculoskeletal health that you must understand. The opposite, instability, leads to progressive stress and damage in your joints and tendons.

Hello, this is Siddharth Tambar from Chicago arthritis and regenerative medicine. On this video I’m talking about instability when it comes to your musculoskeletal system.

So when it comes to Orthopedics, musculoskeletal health, your joints, your tendons, your back, instability is a really key element when it comes to pathology and problems. Stability or tensegrity or biotensegrity is the concept that if you have multiple individual unit in a structure, they may function separately. But when you put them in close approximation and tension together, they create a much stronger whole unit. That’s important because when it comes to your musculoskeletal health, biotensegrity is how you maintain stability, strength, and range of motion through a wide range of motion and do dynamic activity. You see that throughout the musculoskeletal system including places as diverse as the neck, the lower back, shoulder knee, really every single joint.

So when you have a strain or sprain where you’ve had a mild injury to a ligament or tendon or muscle it’s important because if you have a bad enough injury, or if you have progressive multiple injuries, you can eventually develop slight instability. Instability can mean in that case that perhaps the ligament that holds the bones together is slightly weakened over time, or a tendon that is attached to the bone from the muscle is slightly injured and weakened over time as well. That instability can then lead to more stress on the rest of that joint including the bone, the cartilage, and other soft tissue structures. That then leads to more of a degenerative process in that structure. And once you you have a little bit of instability, you’re then more prone to other injuries of other soft tissue structures within that joint as well.

It’s important to understand that in the musculoskeletal system that the stability is supplied by layers and layers deep of tissue. From the skin, to the subcutaneous fat, the fascial layers, to muscles, tendons, ligaments, labrum, meniscus, cartilage, bone, joint, and everything in between. And that while these are individual structures, they are laid upon each other. And if you injure one structure, it affects the structures above and below. In addition, it’s also important to understand that stability exists not only in that one joint, but it exists above and below. So if you have a knee injury, how the stability, angulation, and symmetry at the ankle, hip, and lower back level will affect the knee as well. There is a complex stability process that exists layers and layers deep, above and below, and a 360 manner as well. These are all very much connected.

It’s important because when it comes to treatment, you want to treat every layer that is injured in that structure. Whether that means if somebody has a knee arthritis, if they have some soft tissue instability in the muscle, tendon, or ligament, you want to make sure you treat that appropriately. Whether that’s by a physical therapy approach where you’re strengthening the muscles around that area. Or your correcting posture or symmetry issues or instability issues. Or whether that’s if you’re using an orthobiologic treatment such as platelet-rich plasma, bone marrow derived stem cells, or Prolotherapy to help strengthen some of the soft tissues areas that may be injured over time. You want to make sure that a thorough approach is utilized in order to create better stability. Key because mild improvements in stability and those soft tissue structures, can lead to significant Improvement in biotensegrity or stability, which in turn can then lead to better function, and less pain, better quality life.

Stability is key because it drives a lot of problems in the orthopedic and musculoskeletal system. And stability is key because it’s something in the regenerative medicine armamentarium of treatments that we can actually help to treat. Thank you for your time. Have a good day and live well, bye bye.