Baker’s Cyst Causes, Symptoms, Treatment (Conservative vs. Surgery)

[Music] in this video we're going to look at what causes the baker's cyst to form and how do you know that you've got it what are the typical symptoms and how to best diagnose it then we're going to look at treatments and we're going to look at both conservative as well as surgical treatments and when you should consider which option and lastly we'll take a look at how long it can take to recover for those of you who don't know me my name is Marika I'm one of the physiotherapists from sportscentryphysio.com where you can get online physiotherapy assessment as well as treatment for your injuries have a look at the description of this video if you want to link to our website to understand why a Baker's form it's useful to first look at their Anatomy so you've got several tendons that crosses your knee joint on all sides and whatever you've got a tendon close to a bone or close to another tendon you get little Bursa bursas now a bursa is a fruitful Sac that is meant to reduce friction between tendons or between the tendon and a bone the Bursa at the back of your knee is a special one because it's actually got a direct connection to your knee joint and that connection acts like a one-way valve so fluid from inside the knee joint can float into the bursa now whenever something is irritating the knee joint like you've got an injury there or there's something that causes more inflammation and fluid to be produced this extra fluid also moves into the Bursa and it causes it to extend or swell and that then eventually forms what is known as a baker's cyst this is the reason why it's not that useful to just go and treat the Baker cyst and remove it because it often just comes back if you want to get rid of a big assist you also have to address the cause for it some of the common causes for Bakers is to develop is after meniscus strain especially if there's continuous irritation um arthritis can cause it also injury to the cartilage inside the joint or even a crusade ligament there so there's several different reasons why you can get a baked assist and it can be helpful to understand what is your cause so that you can address it through the correct treatment so what does it feel like when you've got a big assist well in most cases you won't actually know you've got one they are often an act called an accidental finding on an MRI scan or something when they scan your knee for something else they'll go oh you've got a big assist now if it's not causing you any symptoms you don't really have to do anything about it although I will say that that it's usually a sign that your knee joint isn't 100 happy so it may be useful to speak to a physio to understand what type of exercises and activity modification you can do to help your knee joint become a bit more happier but what you will find if you've got a symptomatic bag assist is you can experience a feeling of fullness behind the knee or achiness behind the knee it may sometimes be difficult to straighten your knee fully or bend it fully if it's quite a large one also if you're standing upright and you straighten your knees out you may see that it even looks swollen at the back of your knee then if it's a very big one it may press directly on the blood vessels that run in the back of the knee and if that happens you'll find that your calf swells it can change color to either being red or blue it can be quite achy in the calf and it may even feel hard to touch now all of these are also signs of deep vein thrombosis and if you experience any of it you should really consult your doctor immediately or if you can't get a hold of your doctor go to the emergency department because that usually needs to be dealt with immediately also in even rarer cases you may find that that cyst compresses a nerve now if that happens you'll find that you lose some strength in the muscles in your lower leg you can lose a bit of sensation and you may even see that your calf becomes a bit smaller than normal again if this if you experience any of these symptoms speak to your doctor immediately then lastly in very rare cases the baked assessment becomes so large that it actually bursts and when this happens it can be super painful and it can cause the fluid to leak into your calf muscles again the calf will swell and be red and really really painful and it can be difficult to distinguish that from having a blood clot so it's again important to speak to your doctor as soon as possible if this should happen so how can you properly diagnose a bank assist well you usually have three options the first is that people can use x-ray now x-ray is not that useful because it only shows you bones it doesn't show you any soft tissues so you can't really say that it is a bag assist or not what it can show you though is if there's anything else going on in the joint like arthritis can show up on an X-ray or if there's loose bodies a loose body is whenever a piece of bone or cartilage or something else breaks off and now it's floating inside the joint and irritating it the second choice of scan is you could do an ultrasound scan and some people use that to diagnose it it can be difficult though to distinguish on ultrasound scan between uh bake assist and other causes like a tumor for instance or assist in the meniscus so they are not that great the gold standard at the moment is our MRI scans and this image shows you how it would show up on an MRI scan so the other benefit of the MRI scan is also that you can see other courses like meniscus tears and things like that on it so it's good for diagnosing the cause and not just the fact that it's a big assist the treatment for Baker cysts really should address the cause of the Baker cyst as well otherwise what the research is showing that even if you have surgery sometimes the baby cyst just comes back because that irritation has not gone now if your baked assist is pressing directly on a nerve or on a blood vessel your doctor will likely advise that you go for surgery first before trying anything else because those conditions can cause permanent damage but in all other cases there's a three-step process that's usually followed now step one is that you try and use conservative treatment and conservative treatment consists of things like medication load management exercises I'll discuss them all in more detail in a minute the second step is if that doesn't work then your doctor may suggest that you get an injection to just help calm things down so that conservative treatment can then work and then lastly if you've done everything right and it still doesn't want to approach respond then surgery may be an option so let's look at all three of these steps in more detail so step one conservative management means anything where you don't actually inject or cut things in the knee now as mentioned before meniscus tears is one of the most common reasons why people get bake assist and if you want to know about the specific treatment and exercises for meniscus pairs we've made a whole long video and exercise video about that as well and I'll put links to those in the description of this video so let's look at one of the first and easiest things that your doctor May prescribe which is medication now if your knee joint irritation is due to excessive inflammatory response like with arthritis then you may actually benefit from having anti-inflammatory medication but it really needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis and your doctor may have very good reasons not to prescribe it to you depending on what other medications you're using so before you start taking things over the counter do speak to your doctor about this but it can make a difference icing your knee can be a really good option to help reduce the swelling the inflammation as well as some pain but this does not mean that you just plonk the ice on the knee and leave there for most of the day because actually cooling things down too much can also cause trouble so at the moment the advice is that one leaves the ice back on there for 10 minutes then you remove it for 10 minutes to allow your skin to warm up a little bit and prevent it from getting damaged but then you can reapply it to 10 minutes for a better effect you always want to put a wet towel between your skin and whatever source of cold you're using because that also stops the skin from being injured now I've put a link in the description of this video to different types of ice packs that I found on Amazon that I feel is useful because they they're actually you can attach them to your leg that you don't have to hold it in place the whole time but to be honest a frozen bucket of peas works just as nice because it's contained in the bag just do not eat the peas afterwards because it will be sour load management is a very important topic that people often neglect now what do I mean with load management when something's irritated or injured in the body it only has a certain strength and tolerance for doing jobs like for instance if we think of the knee whenever you stand on your on your legs you carrying weight through the knee whenever you're walking you're carrying right through the knee that um weight and force that it has to deal with increases if you do things like going up a hill or getting up from a really low height now when it's irritated it will only have a certain tolerance for standing on your leg for so many minutes or walking such a distance and where people often go wrong is that they try to force it to do more than what it currently can whereas actually if you reduce your activity to the level that it can tolerate it allows it to calm down often also the reason why the knee has flared up and caused the bike assist it's because you've actually just overdone things so if we think of arthritis for instance arthritis takes years and years to develop so you would have had arthritis in your knee for a very long time before it's now flared up and caused a big assist what I normally see happens is somebody doesn't do much activity and they don't do too much and then suddenly they want to revamp the house or do a lot of gardening after the winter season or increase as they walking distance dramatically now your knees not had the tolerance to do all of that activity so it just overloads and then it flares up so actually to blame the arthritis for the Baker cyst in this instance is not 100 correct because that arthritis didn't cause you trouble while you weren't overdoing things it's only when you suddenly wrap things up that it caused you trouble if however you didn't go up that suddenly with your activity and instead you did Little Bits more week on week to allow it to grow stronger you may never have had trouble so load management is a really important part of rehab but also preventing this coming back now how do we do this so the first step is to establish what activity your knee can currently tolerate without it feeling worse or swelling more so when we think of activity it's everything in the day that you do so it's the amount you stand the amount you walk the number of stairs you climb all of those things that you need to take note of now I know it can be a little bit overwhelming but if physio can help you sort this out and figure out what things are really your aggravating stuff because also we don't want you to just sit down and rest the whole day because actually complete rest can make your knee feel worse and why is that because knees don't have arteries going into them they require movement to get fluid in and out now if you keep your leg dead still and you think well I'm just not going to do anything then your knee will actually start to feel stiffer and more uncomfortable because all of that is just accumulating also if you say that still actually you're losing more strength so it's not useful for the rest of the body so getting the load tolerance or the relative rest we call it um pitched at the right level is really important because bike assists can be caused through several different things and they can come in various levels of irritation or sensitivity there's really no one-size-fits-all type of exercise that works for people so your exercises that you do has to be catering for what is your cause and how sore and irritated your knees currently but in most cases people's knees can usually benefit from two types of exercise one is exercises that increases the circulation and helps to get rid of that extra fluid and helps the joint to get fed and the other type is strength training so let me talk about each one um and give you some examples so let's have a look at what exercises you can do to help improve the circulation in your knee now remember you don't have arteries going in and out of the joint it requires movement to get old fluid out new fluid containing all your nutrients and oxygen into it so the exercises that you can do to help improve the circulation are things that re uses a repetitive flexion and extension motion so lots of movement but that are low load so we don't want a lot of impact because the joint at the moment is a bit of but sensitive in there so what exercises qualify for this well the first one that works really well if it suits your knee is getting on a stationary bike now why a stationary stationary bicycle because it allows you to really adjust things in the moment if you're outside and the bike's not quite set upright it can take quite a lot of effort to get the settings right so stationary bike is better and also if you've got to stop quickly and put your foot down you may re-injure your knee so it's better to start with a stationary bike now the things you want to look at is one how high your saddle is the lower the saddle the more the strain on the knees the higher the the saddle the slightly easier it is also if your knee is really swollen it may not want to bend too much and having a slightly higher saddle can really help with that do you call it a saddle or a seat anyways you know what I mean then also the position you place your feet on so if you're more on the ball of your foot or the ball of your foot is quite far forwards on the pedal then it puts a different type of force through the knee as when the ball of the foot is slightly back on the pedal and the same thing goes for where your body is actually situation situated with regards to forwards or backwards also you're not looking to cycle up the Himalayas so keep it easy we're looking for lots of motion but not high Force at this point as your knee recovers you can of course increase the resistance but the aim for this first period is purely to get the legs moving I need to feel comfortable now it's always good to test a short session first because the knee may not let you know in the moment that you're doing too much so even if it feels 100 fine just do 10 minutes and see how it feels after 24 hours if it feels fine then you can repeat that now if you're somebody who's quite used to exercise and quite fit and you've exercised recently you could do this every single day if you're new to cycling and you've not really done much exercise it may be better to do it every second day now another brilliant option that's low load and can give you lots of movement in the knee is if you get into a swimming pool now you don't have to swim in the swimming pool you can't even just walk up and down because the swimming pool the water takes some of your weight away also you can do deep water running where you've got a float on so you'll see it's like a safety jacket nearly that you've got on so you can be in the really deep water your your feet aren't actually touching the bottom and you're just doing a circular motion with your feet now if you don't have one of those jackets you can also use a pool noodle just underneath your arms that you have it there that it allows you to um to not sink something else that could be useful is instead of doing your own thing you could perhaps join a class or get some hydrotherapy lessons with somebody that they can teach you what's the best thing to do in the water and then you can go and do it on your own now if you don't have access to a pool and you don't really have a bicycle then other things you can do is just simple exercises at home so things like being on the floor or on the bed that's usually better because you don't have to struggle to get down to the floor and just bending and extending your knee and if it hurts to do that help it with your hands it's the movement we're looking for it doesn't have to be done through your own power at the beginning and I'll show you how to do that in this clip do this exercise on a bed because if you're going to try it on the floor if your knee is really painful it's going to be painful to get down onto the floor and back up again and so it's definitely better to do it on a bed I just didn't have a bed that I could use at the moment so what you want to do is Imagine for a moment this is my injured leg and this is my uninjured leg you want to try and sit with your back against a wall so that you support yourself that you don't have to struggle to stay upright and then I like getting the person to bend the uninjured knee because it just gives you a little bit of a help with the movement and then what you do is you just slowly bend your knee to where it wants to go and then let it go back down again and you'll notice I'm placing my hands there to just help it because often if your knees very swollen and painful it actually doesn't want to move because the muscles have just gone to sleep and everything's really stiff so it can really help if you just gently you try to move it with your own muscles but you also help it and you just repeat that movement to where you feel is comfortable for you and you'll find after a few repetitions you actually get more range of motion going another low load option that you can do at home is if your knee will extend while you're sitting in the chair you can just sit and straighten your leg out hold it for a few seconds and bend it again now you can do this in two ways you can either hold it there to get some muscle strength as well or you can just continuously Bend and straighten it and I'll show you how to do it in this clip we're going to not lift the whole leg up as we try to lift if you Flex the foot it helps to activate it and also it doesn't matter if your leg can't go fully straight you just work it to where it can now sometimes you can feel a tight pulling all along your leg that just means other things are a bit tight and stopping you from from getting the full range so if you lean slightly back and just sit leaning backwards in the chair you can usually get it straight without that pulling sensation so the aim of this exercise is to strengthen the quad muscles and get them to work through the full range so it doesn't matter if you lean back to take the straight the the stretch off because you can then better activate this so it's not cheating it's useful especially if you have um that tightens and often if you've had a back injury in the past that's when you'll feel it so what do we do you're sitting on a sturdy chair dining room chair works really well hold on and you're thinking about flexing your foot tightening up your muscle and just slowly trying to get it as straight as you can and you hold it there for one two three four five six seven eight nine ten and slowly back down so what I don't want to see is it goes boom okay you have to control it down because then you get double benefit in any case but again remember if you try this and you think oh man that's really tight at the back it's actually painful nearly as tight lean backwards so that you take the strain off basically your sciatic nerve and your hamstrings and it will allow you to get that full range then we get to strength training exercises now why on Earth would strengthening your muscles help your Baker cyst well when we walk or stand or run or even climb stairs our muscles are meant to absorb most of the force and they're also meant to stabilize your knee joint so the stronger your muscles are the less Force goes through the knee and the better it's stabilized and the less irritation and for knee pain specifically there's strong evidence that strengthening the quadricep muscles which is the front thigh muscles can help reduce knee pain and help improve function um for bake assist I will also say it's good to include exercises for the hamstrings because the Bakers sits so close to the hamstring tendons it can often just make them not want to work that well so it can be useful to include exercises for that so when we look at some examples for strength training exercises I'm going to look at ones you can do at home versus ones you can do in the gym and what the benefits are of those remember if you're looking for exercises specifically for meniscus tears I've made a whole video of that and you can find it in the description of this video okay so simplest option for strength training at home for the for the quads is a high wall set now a high wall set why not a normal wall set well you notice the person in this picture has got her legs at a 90 degree angle that's actually really hard work for uh injured knee and most people won't tolerate it whereas if you do a high wall set where you just go down a little bit the knee usually tolerates that better I demonstrate that and explain all of this in the next clip the first thing to think about is how do we place our legs you want them to be aligned with your hips so hip distance apart not wider not together just kind of in line with that feet do not have to point straight forward but if that's comfortable you do that um it's okay if they turn out a tiny bit to the sides the key here is if you go down and you sit on the wall the knee has to be in line with the middle of the foot so I'm going to keep mine straight for now the second thing to think to consider is how far away from the wall you place your feet so what I mean with that is if I'm going to place my feet close to the wall can you see that when I go down I get quite a lot of flexion in there and actually with your knee traveling over the front of your toes it places the um it moves the the area where you carry the weight more to the front of the knee if you bring your feet slightly forwards and now you go down can you see that I don't have that much of a knee Bend there and you'll feel that you're putting the pressure through a different part of your knee so that's something you can play with usually I find my patients are most comfortable if they place your their feet um a little bit further away from the wall and then you do not have to go down low I would suggest you only start with about a 45 degree angle and see if you can hold that if that feels uncomfortable take yourself up a bit higher if that's all you can hold that's absolutely fine that's where you start so you want to then hold it for 10 seconds come out and relax for 10 seconds and do about 10 repetitions if you feel you get used to that then that's easy you can increase how long you hold it for but you can also slowly slowly increase how far you go down and where you hold it so my Wall's not very slippery it works really well if you use the back of the door that's nice and slippery but whatever you lean against make sure it can't open on you or fall over so that's where you want to hold it so let me show you from this angle my knees are in line with the middle of my feet and I'm just holding the position so you progress it through either hold it for longer or you start going lower down there's no need to go and do it there because that's really hard work for my knees it's fine to do it in the mid-range okay another really useful exercise that I really like is a high box squat now I prefer the box squat actually to the wall set because you get a lot of movement as well so you feed the joint a bit it's a high box set because otherwise the knee may not like going down all the way to the to the level of a chair so you have to find what's useful for your knee and I explain that in more detail in this clip I find a high box squat is quite a comfortable one to start with usually again because it it having a box or a chair behind you forces you to push your bum out of the back a bit more and you get your glutes engaged more and it just feels a bit safer the other nice thing about it is you can set the height so you can put loads of cushions on a chair or use a hide box to limit the range of motion to the comfortable bit if you start without it then it's quite easy to go to low and annoy your knee so it's just a nice stable way whatever you use make sure that that the chair can't move away from you so it's against the wall also preferably one with sides to it so that you can't miss it when you sit down so you've got to make sure that you do not miss the object that you're going to sit down on how do you do it you're standing with your feet hip distance apart again I'll show you from the front in a minute and then as you go down your knees stay aligned with the middle of your foot doesn't matter if your feet point out slightly they just need to go in line with the middle of your foot and you're going to have your hands in front of you stick the bottom out to the back sit down and have your hands out the front to help stabilize and slowly come back up again and that's the level of control I want to see when a person does it so you're sticking your bottom out making sure your knees don't turn in as you're going down they've got to stay out aligned with your feet and you touch your bum down and come back up that's what you do so to show you from the front my knees are staying in line with my feet and I'm just doing that motion as you get stronger as you get used to the exercise you take a cushion away until you can comfortably do it to the level of a normal dining room chair that's all what we're looking for at this point for the hamstrings one of the easiest things to do is uh isometric bridge where you line your back and you lift your bottom up you do not have to lift it all the way up that is really high and you just hold the position so things you want to look out for here is that you don't that you have your feet bent in a comfortable position also you don't want to arch your back up too high and you just lift your bum to where it's comfortable even if you don't lift all the way up that will still make your hamstrings work and your um your glutes contract so you're squeezing the bottom and you're tummy muscles to get you up there not using the back if you feel it in your back come down a tiny bit and squeeze your bum more if your neck's not happy you may have to find a different type of exercise but try to relax your your neck and don't be too much on the neck it's really just the upper back a little bit there and come back down quite often people will try doing the exercises at home and they just cannot do it because it's too uncomfortable and too painful and you'll be surprised that actually going to the gym can make a big difference why is that well you've got so many options for the machines that you can set it up and you can set the resistance just right that it suits your leg also you can usually adjust the position your legs are in that it's just at the angle that you're really comfortable so if you're not getting on with the exercise at home do consider going to the gym now some of the examples of exercise that could be useful at the gym is the leg press machine for instance now you you get two main types of leg press one where you press more straight out from your body like the picture at the top and then you also get a leg press where you press more up towards the ceiling like the pre uh the picture at the bottom now often for knee pain the one where you press straight out is more comfortable there are several ways in which you can adapt the leg press machine as well you can look at the distance your feet are apart usually it's best if you have them hip distance apart then depending on whether you move them up on the plate or down on the plate your knee will take the pressure through a different part and you need to find the position that's comfortable for you that way then also depending on how far you bend it back it can be comfortable or not and usually it's best to limit it that you don't bend your legs all the way back you just keep it to about a 90 degree angle at the start and you make it super light so play with all those elements I've also summarized them in a blog post before and I'll put a link to that blog post in this video as well but the leg press is a brilliant machine to strengthen your quads your hamstrings as well as your glutes then you get the knee extension machine where you lift your legs straight and straighten them out with weight a useful one to strengthen the front thigh muscles what I will say with that is it may not be comfortable to straighten your legs all the way up that's absolutely fine do it to where you can and start with light weights and slow the movement down and build the weight as you get stronger if you can't eventually get to doing it with one leg at a time that's even better because then you can make sure that you're not um that you don't not over working with a with an uninjured leg then for the hamstrings just the opposite instead of lifting the weight up you want to curl the legs by pushing the weight down and again if it's uncomfortable to have them fully straight just straighten them to where it's comfortable and bend them to where it's comfortable and the instructors in the gym will be able to show you how to adjust those machines for that now the low load exercises that we do for circulation can usually be done on a daily basis but ask your physio they'll be able to advise you on that the higher load the strength training exercises should usually only be done twice to three times a week and that's because you need a recovery period after it's each session for the body to properly recover if you do them too often they can actually cause irritation as well so it's useful to speak to a physio to understand when in the week is the best time to do your low load exercises your high load exercises and how many times you can do that but observe how your knee reacts to it as well and especially the 24-hour response is important because sometimes an activity can feel fine while you're doing it but then your leg or your knee can swell significant later on if that happens it's a sign that this exercise is likely not right for you when we talk about injections for bike assist it's we're talking about corticosteroid injections now if you've tried conservative treatment of load management and exercise and perhaps medication for about four to six weeks and you've not seen any results or your knee is super painful and swollen and you just can't get going with things your doctor may suggest that a corticosteroid injection is the way to go now I know people have learned to distrust injections because they're not that great for tendon injuries or muscle injuries but actually when it comes to a baked assist the research shows that they can be very useful and the injection can either be done straight into the knee joint or it can be done under ultrasound guidance into the bake assist itself the important thing to understand is that it's not an immediate relief that you'll get it takes about four to six weeks for that injection to fully work because it works through calming down the inflammatory reaction and that takes time also often the day after the injection can be so painful and that's really common for corticosteroid injections do not let that put you off just ask your doctor what can you do if it's really really painful is there anything you can take is there anything you should do should you put ice on what do they suggest but it's usually just for a day or two and then the pain starts to subside and you start to see improvements also remember when your Nina starts to feel better don't just ramp your training up quickly because you would have had a few weeks where you've not done much and your knee won't be strong to just suddenly start doing loads of stairs or lots of walking you have to slowly slowly increase its tolerance to that otherwise the knee will just flare up again you may also still benefit from doing regular exercise to improve the circulation like we spoke about before as well as strength training because remember you want to address the cause of this all and if you get that knee stronger you can prevent it from coming back in the future before I get onto surgery I would like to answer one of the questions that a Community member asked me on YouTube now this person injured their knee five years ago had a meniscus tear and the doctor just said ah it'll be fine you don't have to do anything physio wasn't even advised but to me never really repaired itself and it never got that much better but then unfortunately covered hit he couldn't see a doctor so no follow-up was was happening and now at this point they're at the point where the knee is super painful they can't walk much um they don't know what to do with it also because it's so painful they've gained a bit of weight because they can't be active so that's making it worse and they've also got a back injury with a nerve that's binging so they are limited to how much time they could spend on their feet and how much exercise they can do so this is now quite a vicious cycle and they're feeling quite down with it now physiotherapy has now started and they've been suggested to do some gentle exercises by the way the things you've been given sounds perfect for the condition your knee is in it's mainly sliding the foot back and forth It's forward so that will help with circulation and it is also doing this at the stand which helps to strengthen the legs gently but they quite desperately wanted to know what else can be suggested here so I would say this case sounds a bit tricky because your back is also influencing how much you can do so I would suggest that you consider are you able to sit on a stationary bike if the answer is yes then that may be an option or otherwise looked into possibly getting in a hydrotherapy pool with somebody who's skilled who can help you figure out exercises that can help both your lower back as well as your knees or even just walking in the pool male rabian option because there's less weight going through and if you use one of those pool noodle things you can often lean forwards that your back feels more comfortable or find a position that's more comfortable now also if your knee does not react to the treatment and it remains that painful you may be a candidate for an injection to see if that helps to calm things down quicker but then from your message I wasn't able to tell that clearly but it sounded as if actually your lower back may be the thing that's limiting your Mobility more than anything else so my question would be would it be more helpful to actually seek help from a physio for your lower back and seeing if you can improve the situation with the nerve being pinched because that will allow you to be more more Mobile in general then the other thing that you mentioned was that you have gained a bit of weight now I know it can be so difficult to lose weight but you can't move and do exercise but if you're able to lose even just a couple of pounds or kilos it can make a big difference to how happy your knees feel because so much less weight that goes through them so see if you can get some advice on diet perhaps or make small changes that can help to reduce your weight if it's possible at all so should you have surgery for a baked assist or not well the research shows that it can be very effective but actually even with surgery you need to also address the cause because if they just go in and remove the bake assist that often just makes it come back they have to also do something about what's causing it like fix the meniscus tear or shave the cartilage if it's very frayed and there's a lot of arthritis in there um and in severe cases they may the doctor may even suggest that you know what actually you just need a knee replacement because this is just going to carry on so surgery has to be also catered to the individual now there are rare cases that you will have surgery as the first choice of treatment and that's whenever something is pressing on a nerve or pressing on a blood vessel the doctor may feel that actually you need surgery to take that pressure off immediately some instances they may suggest an injection first but it will all depend on how severely that pressure is affecting your nerve or your your blood vessel so how long can you expect recovery to take well to be honest there's such a wide variety of reasons why a knee can become irritated but there's no one recovery period that I can name however what I will say is usually a Baker cyst react is formed in reaction to a ongoing irritation and in my experience it takes about three months to see really good results if you're on the right route with treatment you should start seeing results from about four to six weeks but you'll only see very significant results from 12 weeks onwards also if you get a corticosteroid injection they take about four to six weeks to really work so that's the period of time you can you can expect it to take before those kick in brilliant I hope you found this useful and remember if you need more help with an injury you're welcome to consult one of the team via video call the link to the website is in the description of this video take care [Music]

Channel: Sports Injury Physio

Views: 94,022

Keywords: baker's cyst, what is a baker's cyst, baker's cyst cause, baker's cyst symptoms, baker's cyst treatment, exercises for baker's cyst, baker's cyst surgery, baker's cyst recovery time, popliteal cyst, bakers cyst knee

Id: ZuErcWYqWTA

Length: 38min 59sec (2339 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2023