knee-joint is the most commonly used joint in human body. It’s load is second only to ankle joint. So the knee-joint is also the earlist degenerated and most damaged joint in human body. Middle age and elderly people upon 45 years old, especially females, hormone go down will cause degeneration and wastage of knee’s hyaline cartilage. With extra slightly damaged, local necrosis will appear around the hyaline cartilage. Bodies will begin self-repair but the exudates are acid that form chemical inflammatory mediators which cause arthroncus, arthralgia, walking difficulty and so on.

There’re three main reasons of Knee Joint Degeneration as follows: knee-joint’s over loading and over moving; alogotrophy of arthrodial cartilages; injury of joint.

1:Knee-joint’s over loading and over moving. Load too much weight will cause more Joint bearing pressure which brings long-term uncommon stimulations that makes arthrentasis as time goes on. Turning the joints to much will raise frequency of abrasion. Gerontal patients’ joints are easy becoming deformed because their self repair functions are reduced.

2: Alogotrophy of arthrodial cartilages. Alogotrophy makes the arthrodial cartilages repair more slowly that cannot keep the normal process of metabolism .So fibrous degeneration will appear among the arthrodial cartilages that cause deformity in the end.

3:Repeatedly occurring injury of joint. Injury will cause proliferation of local desmocytes. It will form some scar tissues while gerontal patients move less and less, the joint will continuous hardening that form degenerative joint disease in the end.

Degenerative arthritis of the knee joint likes to appear in the knee joint that loads more weight, almost every case has different degrees of pain, raise slowly with the state of the illness. It mainly has obvious pain when the knee-joint begin moving and reduse the pain as time goes on. More weight loading or more movements of knee-joint will raise the pain, this is a characteristic of gonarthrosis. Sometimes the pain will be emissive, for example, the pain of hip joint can be radiate to inner thigh, around knee-joint. Ankyloses will appear at the beginning of knee joint degeneration, as the patients will feel themselves cannot move flexible or even begin moving after a long-time fixed position. And then the joints will become unbalanced, degree of latitude will decrease and the ability of walking will come down, especially going up or downstairs; running and jumping. Some patients’ legs at the later period may be deformity. Bandy leg is the commonest result that also call bowlegs.

The mainly symptom of knee-joint degeneration is the knee-joint pain. It’s a kind of dull pain that obviously appear in the morning or after a long-time fixed position and this pain may decrease after starting moving. The patients may feel themselves inflexible when they turn their knee-joint, worse after rests. On the other hand, knee joints may feel pain again after too much moving because the friction of the joints, worse with the weather changing. Knee-joints are tight and noisy when moving. These symptons may get worse and worse the process of the pathological change. Except the pains, local swelling, exudant, muscular atrophy and even Joint deformity and  limitation of motion will be occurred.

The arthritis caused by knee-joint degeneration belong to “Bi Zheng” in tradictonal Chinese medicine, the reason is wind-cold-wetness bype of arthralgia. Acupuncture therapy is effective to the disease. Our acupuncture department cure this disease by cauteropuncture with fever; injectio ad acumen and bee venom therapy. The therapies are based on acupoints around the pain area, combined with acupoints in main and collateral channels and acupoints based on diagnosis.