Chronic Knee Pain in a Former Athlete: HealthBrokering™ Case Study

34-year-old female. Former athlete. Chronic knee pain.

Strength training. Physical therapy. Cortisone injections. Years of effort, with little lasting relief.

She was referred to our HealthBrokering™ team by a trusted peer to explore whether there were any remaining ways to support her chronic knee pain. She still trained hard, had done all “the things,” and had largely resigned herself to feeling pain after training, which made her hesitant to engage, confident that anything we might suggest would be familiar territory.

Athletes often have unusual early access to strength coaching and rehabilitation. Over time, this can create an undercurrent of familiarity.

The knee pain had been present for years. Like many athletes, she learned to carry it by grinding through, adapting, and quietly accepting limits without fully questioning them.

This is not a step-by-step protocol for knee pain. It’s a case about how opportunities to improve can be missed when people are working from different notes.

Starting With Orientation, Not Answers

Instead of starting with answers, we asked orienting questions.

What emerged wasn’t a lack of effort. It was a lack of shared tracking, pattern visibility, and aligned interpretation across providers.

By tracking, we mean writing down what aggravated symptoms, what reliably helped, and what changed week to week (eg. environment, sleep, training load, stress, food, and recovery).

No one had been capturing trends on paper. There were no consistent re-evaluation checkpoints. No post-workout reflections to establish what reliably helped or hurt.

Initial Coordination Steps

We proposed two initial steps.

1. Consulting 2–3 sport-specific physical therapists with a movement-forward mindset to compare overlap in their thinking.
2. Working with an athlete-forward dietitian to structure recovery support and identify any GI triggers that might be keeping her system on edge.

There were other layers we felt could matter, a sport-literate mental health provider, a functional medicine physician, but we intentionally started with the largest, most immediate levers, allowing trust to build through consistency rather than persuasion.

We found meaningful overlap across the PTs. Based on both location and personality fit, one was selected. From there, we created a shared executive summary, ensuring all providers were aligned, communicating, and rowing in the same direction.

The Timeline

Over time, recovery grew more predictable, and movements she had avoided began to return.

This was not linear. Travel, missed sleep, life stress all affected symptoms. But instead of reacting, we tracked, iterated, and built strategies for disruption.

Relief from chronic pain created breathing room. With that space, the work naturally shifted toward the next phase, building her Health401k® with an eye toward what life could look like in 10, 20, and 30 years.