Knee injuries are quite common even among people that do not do much physical exercise.
The main injuries that you hear about are ligament strains and tears, cartilage injuries and cruciate ligament strains or ruptures.
As with all things medical there is debate about the best therapeutic regime.
Long ice baths have been discounted as an effective therapy immediately after a sports injury, though local contrast bathing with both ice and heat is effective at this time. The difference is that the heat with ice creates a shunting action to help the blood supply in the area to both drain the inflammatory swelling and stimulate blood flow into the damaged area.
Surgery to a ruptured Cruciate Ligament is much debated. This probably depends on the amount of instability in the knee and the degree of rupture. The Cruciate is a connective tissue band made of of scores of small fibres like in a rope rather than one piece.
Techniques for this surgery are improving. In most cases the surgeon will use a graft from another part of the body to put in the place of the Cruciate Ligament.
Torn cartilage tissue are usually trimmed away from the main cartilage. This stops the torn piece clicking or jamming up the knee movement.
Ligaments, medial and lateral, are left to repair themselves with the help of rehabilitation exercise.
Whatever the injury it is very important to do rehabilitation exercises to stabilise and strengthen the knees so you do not repeat the injury.
Do them daily for a year. Very important.
Do exercises for your knees even if you have not injured and they will help strengthen and tone the tissue that drive the knee.
Search – ‘ACL knee rehabilitation’ or similar and you will see photos and videos of the sort of thing you need to do.
Osteopathy helps a lot by balancing the soft tissues around the knee and in the leg and pelvis. This is important.
Mostly rehab is achieved by you. Not expensive and only a little time consuming. 10 minutes twice a day.
Good luck