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Without a skeleton, you’d be a bag of muscles, blood, and guts, unable to walk, stand, or move.
Besides giving your body form and structure, bones serve as protection for various parts of your body—your skull protects your brain, your ribs protect your heart and lungs, and your spine protects the nerves of the spinal column.
Muscles help your body move, but without bones to attach to, your muscles would be useless.
A joint is the point where two bones meet. There are fi xed or immovable joints, like the skull, and moveable joints like hinged joints—fingers and toes; ball-and-socket joints—shoulders and hips; gliding joints—between your vertebrae; and pivot joints—your neck.
Bones are fastened to other bones by long, fibrous straps called ligaments and tendons. Cartilage is the flexible, rubbery substance in our joints that reduces friction where they rub against each other.
Bones are made of living cells. If you’ve ever had a broken bone you know how much it hurt. If your bones weren’t living, there wouldn’t be any pain and they would never mend. The soft bone marrow inside many bones is where most of the blood cells in the body are made.
Your knees pay the price when you twist and turn
Your knees allow your legs to bend and straighten so you can walk, run, jump, and turn. Because your knee is complex with several kinds of supporting and moving parts, including bones, cartilage, muscles, ligaments, and tendons, there are many ways your knees can be a pain—literally.
The meniscus is a shockabsorbing cartilage in the knee located between the thigh and shin bones. An injury to a meniscus is a familiar sports-related injury and occurs when you twist or rotate your upper leg while your foot stays still.
The most common symptom of a torn meniscus is pain. Usually, the knee feels as if it has “given out.” If the tear is large enough, the knee may “lock up” if the torn piece moves into the middle of the joint. The torn piece of the meniscus can catch in the hinge of the knee and prevent the leg from straightening or bending.
Your first step should be to reduce the swelling and pain, usually by applying the RICE principle (rest, ice or cold for short periods, compression with a wrap around the knee, and elevation).
Contact your physician for an evaluation and further treatment. Meniscus injuries when you twist and turn their own, thus once torn, it remains that way without care. Sometimes a previous untreated injury becomes painful months or years later, particularly if the knee is injured a second time. Although symptoms of meniscal injury may disappear, they frequently persist and require treatment.
An orthopaedic surgeon may be able to repair a damaged or torn meniscus, usually with arthroscopic surgery. “If the meniscus is removed, it usually leads to early arthritis. If arthritis develops, in older patients, a knee joint replacement is an option,” says Ned Amendola, M.D., director of UI Sports Medicine. “But for younger individuals— those under 50 or 55 years old who want to remain active—there are alternatives to replacing the entire joint. One of these options may be a meniscal transplant if the knee is still in pretty good condition. Other options include injections, cartilage resurfacing, or partial knee replacement,” he says.
Visit UI Sports Medicine for more information.
Did you know. . .
- The human skeleton contains 206 bones
- The longest bone in your body is your femur (thigh bone)
- The smallest bone is the stirrup (inside your ear)
- Your face has 14 bones
- Humans and giraffes have the same number of neck bones
- 97 percent of earth’s creatures don’t have a spine
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