davester

PT may not have helped you avoid surgery, but for many of us it has worked tremendously. I had a bad torn meniscus from playing soccer + running a few years ago. It got to the point where I could barely walk up and down stairs, walking in general was difficult and I had severe knee locking. I visited a surgeon who gave me the standard "sure, we can go in and clean that up but then you'll need PT plus a lengthy recovery period" speech. After reading up on the less than 50% surgery success rate of blind studies where they compared surgery + PT versus sham surgery (i.e. making incisions but not actually doing anything else) + PT) I decided to try the PT route. I went through two crummy physical therapists who just gave me generic exercises to do. The third one was great...spent two sessions purely on isolating the problems I needed to work on, asked me how dedicated I would be to fixing the problems and then got me to hard work on targeted exercises. Net result...my knee is perfectly fine now. I can ride, run, play soccer, whatever, without pain. Importantly though, YMMV. At the very least, if you do decide to do the surgery then your PT conditioning may help to speed your recovery. I just suggest that you ask yourself if you've taken the PT far enough to be sure that it's not working and that you really want to go under the knife.