There are many potential causes of knee pain, each requires assessment and specific treatment. Some principles include avoiding sharp pains, walking as smoothly and naturally as your body allows (try to avoid limping), reduce swelling with compression and ice when you can, and activate your leg muscles as much as you can if it's not too sore at the knee. Remember you're always best to have your knee assessed by a professional.
Knee injury from trauma may cause meniscus (knee cartilage) tears, ligament damage, swelling, and guarding to name a few potential issues. Each injury and person is likely to require some specialised or different management strategies depending on how the injury was sustained, how long ago, how severe, and even past history.
See Treating Sporting Injuries for some advice on how to handle a knee injury if it is acute which mean it's happened really recently. A good assessment from your physio should help guide you as to weather or not you need to see a surgeon or get imaging performed.
All of these trauma induced injuries require an appropriate clinical assessment to guide the right path of treatment such as reducing swelling, reduce muscle guarding, improve movement or improve strength in weakened areas.
Other types of knee pain may include a vague pain around the knee cap, clicking, difficulty going up/down stairs or swelling around the knee cap (patella). In these circumstances, it is more likely the knee pain is originating from a biomechanical imbalance (poor balance and alignment through the body/leg). In these circumstances, we need to work out where things aren't functioning well, and what we can do to improve the functioning to unload the knee and allow it to settle. We could add some strength work such as squats or 'wall sitting' to strengthen the quads, stretch tight structures such as the hamstring. Body Matters Physio utilises some great soft tissue release techniques such as Strain Counterstrain, or Dry Needling to correct the balance around the knee.
With many cases of knee pain, it is valuable to check the movement and function of the hip and foot/ankle also as issues there may be causing an excessive load through the knee.
Knee Arthritis is often in a longer term knee pain scenario. The knee might be achy, stiff and no specific event occurred to explain the pain. This is particularly seen in people over 50 years old, but could be found in younger people too. A homework programme of walking, bike, strengthening and stretching can be developed for you to help self manage this problem. Some treatment at Body Matters Physio can also be really effective in reducing the way knee arthritis effects your life and function.