Human leg in a straight line, which represents the mechanical longitudinal axis of the leg, the Mikulicz line. This line stretches from the hip joint (or more precisely the head of the femur), through the knee joint (the intercondylar eminence of the tibia), and down to the center of the ankle (the ankle mortise, the fork-like grip between the medial and lateral malleoli). In the tibial shaft, the mechanical and anatomical axes coincide, but in the femoral shaft they diverge 6°, resulting in the "femorotibial angle" of 174° in a leg with normal axial alignment. A leg is considered straight when, with
Triple tibial osteotomy to distribute load evenly across the surfaces; these are crescent-shaped discs of cartilage facing each other from side to side across the joint. They are thicker at the outside and with a thin inner aspect and they also have nerve fibres that help to tell the brain how much load is getting transmitted through the joint. The medial (inside) meniscus is often damaged with a long-standing cruciate ligament rupture because it is firmly attached to the tibia and gets crushed during abnormal cranial movement of the tibia. The lateral (outside) meniscus is more firmly attached to the femur and does