Knee Ligament Rehabilitation.

The primary purpose of this book is to "provide rehabilitation strategies and techniques that will be useful" in rehabilitation after knee ligament injury. The 21 authors selected for this purpose proved successful in offering examples of rehabilitation techniques, but their provision of rehabilitation strategies was unsatisfactory. in most of the chapters, there was very little theoretical or research-supported rationale offered for the methods suggested by the authors. This failure may be due to the design of the presentation. The chapters are primarily organized by medical diagnosis, describing the rationale for surgical management rather than the rehabilitation strategy. One of the other problems that resulted from this format was a superficial handling of the content of particular chapters, perhaps because the 219 pages of text are divided into 19 chapters (eg, the biomechanics/biomaterials chapter is only 7 pages long). The many chapters written by different authors also resulted in redundancy of information.

Despite these flaws, this book represents one of the few texts solely devoted to a description of knee rehabilitation methods. Of the 19 chapters, the best were those that covered instrumented examination of the knee, meniscus tears, rehabilitation following meniscal surgery, medial collateral ligament injury, postoperative rehabilitation for synthetic anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction, nonoperative posterior cruciate ligament rehabilitation, posterior cruciate ligament reconstruction, and optimizing the nonsurgical treatment of joint contractures. The most disappointing chapter in the book is the one devoted to knee bracing. This chapter gave a very brief, superficial overview of the primary types of knee braces and did not really provide any useful clinical information.

This book will probably best serve the physical therapist who sees a variety of patients with knee injury and who would like descriptions and excellent illustrations of exercises for knee rehabilitation. The book also offers excellent descriptions of ligament stability testing for easy and quick reference by the clinician.