I hurt my knee about a month ago and had a Physical therapist look a it and she did some tests and said it is either a torn meniscus or a strained and recommended wearing a knee brace and if it still hurts in a week to go to the doctor. So I looked at both things and read up on them online and symptom wise and how the injury occurred I thought it was a meniscus tear. It still hurt a week later, I went to my doctor, he did the same thing, and said that where my pain is coming from is the medial meniscus and ordered an MRI. I got the MRI it took like 35 minutes. Then 3 days later the doc's nurse called and all she said was, "there are now obvious tears, if it keeps hurting go see an orthopedic." Now its been 1 month and 3 ays since I injured my knee, and it still hurts a little, walking every once in a while, I still have a little bit of a limp still and it hurts to run and gets a little irritated going down stairs.
Could he have just glanced for seconds (he only takes 2-5 mins. per appointment) or could the "no obvious tears" mean it's small or what?
Could he have just glanced for seconds (he only takes 2-5 mins. per appointment) or could the "no obvious tears" mean it's small or what?
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Your primary care doc did a reasonable thing, getting an MRI.
The MRI was read by a radiologist, like someone else said, someone who spends years in training to do so.
The final arbiter on any knee / MRI combination is an orthopedist, who examines your knee, sees the MRI pictures that detail a lot (but not everything) in the knee -- there are weak points to MRI.
Depending on the synthesis of results, and your status (runner versus normal person versus obese person versus person with bad DJD) the ortho will ask you what you want, and give you choices, with their serious input applied : From there it jumps to arthroscopy (looking inside with a scope) to open eval to whatever.
The primary care doc, unless VERY unusual, will not care what the actual images look like. The ortho should.
It is semi-disturbing but also very commonplace that you would receive the information filtered through the docs assistant, further diluting and biasing and contaminating whatever information inside. GET AN ORTHOPEDIST. Bring your images on disk. Good luck.
The MRI was read by a radiologist, like someone else said, someone who spends years in training to do so.
The final arbiter on any knee / MRI combination is an orthopedist, who examines your knee, sees the MRI pictures that detail a lot (but not everything) in the knee -- there are weak points to MRI.
Depending on the synthesis of results, and your status (runner versus normal person versus obese person versus person with bad DJD) the ortho will ask you what you want, and give you choices, with their serious input applied : From there it jumps to arthroscopy (looking inside with a scope) to open eval to whatever.
The primary care doc, unless VERY unusual, will not care what the actual images look like. The ortho should.
It is semi-disturbing but also very commonplace that you would receive the information filtered through the docs assistant, further diluting and biasing and contaminating whatever information inside. GET AN ORTHOPEDIST. Bring your images on disk. Good luck.
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Your doc did not read the MRI, a radiologist with MRI knowledge read it. They spend years in residency learning to read these tests.
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the doctor (radiologist) makes the call and reports it to the doctor