Modification of activities: 

• Stop running, don’t even try if you any symptoms above
• Long walks – decrease the amount of time you are spending putting weight through your knee
• Any gym based activity, which is very dynamic such as the popular HITT sessions need to be stopped.
• Even just doing upper body exercises can impact your knee mechanics, whilst these maybe not detrimental they can increase your knee recovery time. 
• It’s not a strength issue so stop all glute exercises as it’s more likely going to be a mechanical issue.

How to assess for Knee Pain

Traumatic Knee Pain

Your Physiotherapist or Health Professionals aim is to see if you can actively bend and extend your knee, then a therapist should then passively bend and extend you knee. A few specialist tests would then be performed to assess the structural integrity of the knee joint. This would include joint line palpation and then looking at the ability of your knee to stop forward movement and backwards movement this is assessing your ACL , PCL knee assessment.

You then want to test the ability of your knee to rotate to the inside and outside of the knee this will assess integrity of the shock absorber of the knee the menisci knee assessment.

If there are still any concerns about knee integrity and stability you should then see an orthopaedic surgeon who will then perform similar tests and request further investigations

Insidious Knee Pain

This is where you must become a really good therapist detective and visit Knee pain sites
Same as above, your physiotherapist should look at the structural integrity of your knee. The difference is this has been over time an accumulative issue.

So, your knee is not happy the question is why? Especially if there has not been a traumatic incident to date, maybe there was one in the past but nothing recent.

I would look at the Foot because a quarter of your bones in the body are contained within the Foot, so check the relationship between the Knee and Foot, maybe there is not one. The next step would be the relationship with the Pelvis and Sacrum with your knee.

Then of course you must consider the Spine, which connects everything together. There are 33 bones in the Spine, so it’s worthwhile to see what’s not moving the way it should. Then look at the Skull because this sits on the top of your Spine. The Head and the Pelvis will determine where your body centre will be, so it’s quite important.

Once the above assessment has been done your physiotherapist should have a hypothesis and every session should focus on either joint mobilisations, movement sequences, acupuncture, or re-learning sequences these are just a few treatment options.

Imaging which your GP or Orthopaedic surgeon might request

• X-ray. These images show the alignment of your bones and whether you have arthritis or broken bones. These images alone won’t show problems with your spinal cord, muscles, nerves, or disks.
• MRI or CT scans. These scans generate images that can reveal herniated disks or problems with bones, muscles, tissue, tendons, nerves, ligaments, and blood vessels.
• Blood tests. These can help determine whether you have an infection or another condition that might be causing your pain.
• Bone scan. In rare cases, your doctor might use a bone scan to look for bone tumours or compression fractures caused by osteoporosis.

Medications

If over the counter NSAIDs don’t help, your GP may offer you a higher dose of an NSAID and a medicine to protect your stomach. Or, they may recommend a stronger medicine called an opioid. You should usually only take this medicine for a very short time. You may become dependent on it if you take it for a long time. Your GP may also offer you a short course of a muscle relaxant.

In my opinion I will always try the natural anti-inflammatory methods, and this is what I recommend to my patients. I fully understand when your pain threshold has been reached, and you can’t sleep, it is very tempting to reach for the medication. For me, most people’s pain does not respond to the list above because for the majority of the time your hip pain is the symptom and not the root cause.
Have a look at these natural foods 13 anti-inflammatory foods.

Injections and other procedures

Depending on the source of your pain – for example, if you have deep knee pain and are unable to sleep and walk injections may be offered by orthopaedic surgeon and this should be done by guided imaging usually by a radiologist. Other medical conditions might need to be ruled out before this is recommended by taking a blood test.

Surgery

This is the last resort, and any conscientious orthopaedic consultant will not perform surgery if it’s not going to improve your knee outcome. it’s all about having good structural integrity and feeling confident with your knee rather than having a knee dictating your life.