When you've turned 60 and a knee goes, a few things become clear. You can never start talking about the wonky hinge without someone else trumping your tale of loss. Knee-capping, you could call it. Suddenly you are surrounded by experts, some of whom seem to have been struggling with this most wayward of joints since birth. They start by sympathising, which is nice, but end up knowing what is best for you, which is not. When my right knee started to go six years ago, I was 54 and had just gone up a 20,000ft mountain in Ladakh, on the borders of Tibet. More to the point, I'd just come down a 20,000ft mountain in Ladakh, twisting and hammering my legs to find footsteps in the wobbly shale. It seemed to me the diagnosis was stark: I'd torn my cartilage and run out of knee coupons.

I'd also just become a father again and started fretting about how I was going to get down on the carpet with the Lego, never mind provide a stream of inch-perfect crosses to help my son Arthur develop his heading skills. Even the lightest contact with a football sent a bolt of pain into the heart of the joint. My career was over.

Last year I heard about a new treatment, called Fenzian, and decided to give it a go. Pioneered by Eumedic, a Berkshire-based company, it involves a hand-held electronic device that is passed across the afflicted area imparting low-level electromagnetic impulses into the skin. It has been likened to a non-piercing form of acupuncture. While its use is pain-free and takes about 20 minutes a session, it claims to open a dialogue between the damaged part and the central nervous system, enabling the body to target its own healing powers more effectively.

The system is used in the US where certain studies and testimonials suggest astonishing results, particularly in sports injuries; a 27-year-old basketball player who could no longer walk because of chronic foot pain gets eight sessions of Fenzian and is on his feet again; a woman with neuralgia so bad it has resisted all conventional forms of medical attention takes four treatments from the machine and is pain-free in a week.

The Queen had a similar knee injury

Although it was developed in the UK, there are only five licensed practitioners here. A recent study of 600 patients, suffering from a range of non-musculoskeletal conditions, showed that most felt they had been “cured”, though this was less evident among the older ones and those who had had symptoms for more than six months.

I hardly agonised about becoming a guinea-pig. Why would I? The knee was doing quite enough of that. After the Ladakh mountain it swelled like an inflatable splint, stiffening the whole leg. Back in England, my GP diagnosed a tear in the medial meniscus, or inner-side cartilage. The Queen had something similar and appears to have made a full recovery. I didn't do so well. The tear was fixed, but the joint then went downhill. Ironic, since that was the activity that it was least able to take part in.

In the specialist's terms, the surgery had worked since the meniscal tear was mended. But the invasion, though slight, seemed to have triggered arthritis. I tried physio, but the exercises made it worse. I tried Synvisc, a viscous liquid intended to reduce the joint's interior friction. A sort of human brake fluid. Something went wrong and I was immobilised for a week. Inevitably, I started looking at the pros and cons of knee replacements, whole or partial. I even began comparing makes, as you would if you were getting a bike, and found myself in a conversation with Sir David Attenborough on the subject while interviewing him about Life On Earth. The trouble with the knee, he said, is that man still has not quite got used to standing up.

It was at this point that a friend recommended Dr Naseem Tariq, the sole Fenzian consultant in London. Round he comes with his silver machine. It is the size of an electric razor, with an LED screen that shows the “neural resistivity” in the afflicted place. He brushes it to and fro across and around my knee joint, and into my skin goes a current that, at worst, feels like a sharp tickle. Out of the machine come a series of beeps, measures of storeable information which the machine is drawing from my responses.

The surgeon James Colthurst is the man responsible for Fenzian. Areas of the body, he says, can get stuck in a pain loop, rather like the scratch in an LP. The Fenzian device can detect points of blocked or altered electrical energy and then reprogramme the nervous system to communicate with those places.

The return of a long-gone prodigal

At present, treatment costs several hundred pounds; £350 for the first appointment, £150 for subsequent ones. I had 15 shots and after the third or fourth, strange things did happen, no doubt about it. Basically my knee started to change shape. It had already done this over the years because of the arthritis, but this was the result of serious fluid reduction. This reduced the stiffness, which, in turn, made me more willing and able to exercise the thing. Back came the inside-knee muscle like a long-gone prodigal.

Did it cure the arthritis? No, but then I can't see how anything short of replacement or cartilage implant would solve it. What is incontrovertible, since I have been my own study, is that 18 months ago I couldn't go up a Lakeland fell, and that since then I have bagged the Old Man of Coniston (2,635ft) and, more to the point, stopped browsing the net for the high-tech ceramic hinges, which I gather are doing a great trade among baby-boomers. The other day I side-footed a ball about ten yards to my now six-year-old son, and I swear he looked at me in a new light.

For more information: www.fenzian.co.uk

What's the Evidence? By Dr Toby Murcott

Can Fenzian treat damaged joints? There is one study, published in 2007, that examined the medical notes of 591 patients who had received the treatment. This was not a clinical trial but an analysis of past cases. It showed that patients who had Fenzian treatments did, on the whole, report improvements, some significant.

So it confirms that it works? No, it merely suggests that it is worth further investigation.

What about the electrostimulation? Different types of electrostimulation have been used for many years for a variety of conditions. One of the commonest is TENS, transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, which offers pain relief for arthritis and joint pain, among other things. A review in 2002 of electrical stimulation research concluded that it can improve hand grip strength in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Dr Toby Murcott is a science writer and broadcaster

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