Originally Posted by
greybeard
A little bit of information or knowledge can be dangerous. We all have a dominant eye and a dominant leg and they often coincide. ("So what, grey, we're talking about my knee here." Patience, we'll get there in a sec.)
So, for some of us the dominant leg is really dominant. You want to know which one is your dominant leg, stand on one leg. Chances are, unless your knee is really, really hurting right now, you just stood on your dominant leg which, if I am right, is the one with the inflamed knee.
The short of it. Your dominent leg will correspond to rigidity along the entire side of your body, as compared to the other side, on which the ribs will be much more flexible, much more susceptible to constricting and expanding.
The chances are that your pelvis on the side of your dominant leg does not move up and down with the ease required to create the type of machine that you would want when stepping onto and pushing off your foot on the side that coincides with your inflamed knee. Improve the functioning of your pelvis, learn how to soften the ribs on that side, free the connection between your pelvis on that side and your shoulder blade on the other side, and your knee might improve.
Or you can follow your doctor's advise.
How to improve the movement of parts on your dominent side and the coordination of activity in your pelvis with what goes on in your upper torso on the other side of your body (the two are intertwined in all of us) takes some fun exploration over time.
A visit to a good Practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method, the Feldenkrais Guild of North America can help you with that, and a single Functional Integration lesson, will give you some insight into whether my hypothesis, and that is all it is, has some vitality, or whether there is something else about how you organize yourself that can be improved that will put less undo and unnecessary pressure into your knee in running. You should be able to tell after one to three such lessons whether you would like to explore this system of self education. It can become a very enriching and enjoyable part of your movement regimines that will allow you choices in how you do what you want. Hope this helps.