Before beginning treatment of ACL injuries, I always make sure my patients have a good sense of the ACL’s physical location within the knee joint. Knowing these basics is important for understanding differences among graft types and long-term effects of ACL surgery decisions.
Are you ready for your head to spin? You will learn another language: Latin.
You will also learn more about the anatomy of your knee in the next 10 minutes than you ever wished to know.
Location of the ACL
Let’s start with a good visual of the knee.
What you see on the diagram is the right knee and you are looking at it from the front.
In the front is your knee cap (patella). The top is your thigh bone also known as the femur and at the bottom you see the shin bone (also known as the tibia), it is the larger of the two bones on the bottom.
ACL Ruptures
Next, let’s review what happens during an ACL injury. To get a better viewing angle, refer to the second diagram. Here, we have removed the knee cap and are looking at the knee straight on.
What we see here are the following ligaments of the knee:
- ACL aka the anterior cruciate ligament
- PCL (further back), the posterior cruciate ligament
- MCL and LCL (on the sides of the knee), the medial collateral and lateral collateral ligaments
Yep, all the fuss is about this little tendon.
I don’t like fancy words, they are hard to remember. If we look at their meanings in Latin, the medical terms become much easier to understand and memorize. Anterior means “near the front,” Cruciate mean “cross-shaped,” and Ligament comes into English from the word that means “to bond.”
A-ha! ACL really refers to the “cross-shaped bond near the front.”
We can work with this now.
Want to know more? Join my Facebook group, it’s for everyone seeking information on ACL injury prevention, recovery, and screening. 👇
I see clients in Southern Illinois and Missouri.
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