What Is The ACL?

What does the ACL do? What is an ACL injury? How do you treat it? And what happens if you don’t? With footage from real operations, Yorkshire Knee Clinic’s Dave Duffy explains.

What Does The ACL Look Like?

A ligament connects bones in a joint together to keep it stable. The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) is one of the most important ligaments of the knee, helping to keep the joint stable when you twist or pivot.

A common sporting injury, an ACL tear may arrive with a popping sensation, an inability to carry on playing and rapid swelling of the joint.

In this video, Yorkshire Knee Clinic’s Dave Duffy takes a camera into the knee to explore the ACL, show an ACL reconstruction in action, and demonstrate what can happen when you don’t treat an ACL tear.

Notes for the squeamish: This video features footage of knee operations.

•  There is a very small amount of blood – mostly you will see the off-white surfaces of the femur, tibia and the ACL itself
•  You will see the creation of new sockets for the ligament graft, and the shaving of loose fragments

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