Travis Scott, 28, may have done some pretty serious damage to his knee when he took a fall on stage on Oct. 12. The rapper was in the middle of a high energy performance at Rolling Loud in New York City when he tumbled down and landed on his leg wrong. Although he was limping around afterward, he went on to finish the performance, but according to the look of a video that shows the fall, the injury may be too difficult to heal on its own. We spoke EXCLUSIVELY with Board Certified orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Steven Struhl, who saw the video, and he explained to us the type of knee injury he thinks Travis may be battling and what could fix it.
“What’s talked about in the press is that he dislocated his knee and as an orthopedic surgeon, the term dislocate your knee can be used for two rather separate and rather different things,” Dr. Struhl, who specializes in shoulder and knee procedures and performs innovative treatments like stem cell therapy, PRP injections and Needle Arthroscopy, EXCLUSIVELY told HollywoodLife. “Having said that, I think his was the second, not the first. And what I mean by that is one of the injuries you can get from what it sounds like he did, is a dislocation of the kneecap or the patella. A lot of times people will say, ‘I dislocated my knee’ and as a doctor you assess them, you go, you think to yourself that they didn’t really dislocate their knee. They dislocated their kneecap. A true knee dislocation doesn’t seem consistent with everything I’ve read about this story. First of all, if you truly dislocated your knee, he would have never gotten back up and started performing again.”
Dr. Struhl went on to talk about treatment options and how a dislocated knee would definitely require major surgery, but since Travis’ injury seems to be a dislocated kneecap, he has some options. “There is nonsurgical treatment for that one depending on what exactly he damaged when he dislocated it,” he explained. “Sometimes when you dislocate the kneecap, you ripped so much stuff. That surgery really is the best option. So the way the story reads to me, it’s more that he dislocated his patella or his kneecap because a true knee dislocation is a super high energy injury. Usually a football player who gets absolutely annihilated, or a high speed motor vehicle accident, that sort of stuff. It’s pretty hard to do in the way that that’s described. But more importantly, he wouldn’t have gotten up, he wouldn’t have finished the performance and there wouldn’t be a question on whether you need surgery. So that’s the problem with following the story in the press. It’s hard to know, is it a dislocated kneecap or dislocated knee?”
Since Travis’ injury occurred, he has reportedly been weighing his options in how to fix it and is trying to decide whether or not he wants to try and let the knee heal on its own or get surgery. He has been leaning more towards having surgery since he wants to get back to performing and be able to play his favorite sport, basketball, ASAP according to sources at TMZ, and Dr. Struhl also weighed in on how that would affect the situation.
“If he had a true knee dislocation that probably will need surgery to reconstruct the ligaments because when you dislocate the knee, you disrupt usually two and most normally three of the four major ligaments of the knee,” he said. “And he would never be able to play basketball if he didn’t get that fixed. And then the decision for surgery would be an easy one. Now if it was a knee cap injury, what will probably be done is he’ll probably get an MRI to see what tissues got ripped. And depending on what that is, it’s probably the strength of the need for surgery. The fact that he wants to play basketball would tilt one a little more towards an aggressive treatment because the main downside of nonsurgical treatment is that it could happen again.”
Finally, Dr. Struhl gave us an idea of how surgery to fix a dislocated kneecap can go and what the recovery process can consist of. “The surgery to fix the kneecap itself should be less than an hour. A true knee dislocation is very complex and many hours,” he admitted. “If it is a patella dislocation surgery, you actually couldn’t put weight on it. What you might do, depending on what exact techniques you use is, you’d probably limit the amount of how the knee bends for the first six weeks or so. You might start with a limited range and then expand that out over six weeks. But the person would not have to be on crutches if it was a knee dislocation. It would depend a lot on the nature of all the injuries. But again, that’d be a much more complicated recovery.”