Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your health regimen.
I sat down with Dr. Allan, the doctor I went to in Wisconsin when I was trying to get my own health back, and we spent an hour on one question: why are joints and ligaments failing across the country at ages that make no sense? Joint pain with normal imaging is one of the most dismissed complaints I know of. Your knee hurts, your shoulder gives out, your hip aches after a two mile run, and the scan comes back clean. You get a bursitis label, a cream, an anti-inflammatory, and a shrug.
I was an All-American collegiate shot putter. I had knee tendinitis in both knees while training under a coach who was obsessive about form. I still have a foot injury that will not go away. So I am not asking this from the outside. The answer we landed on has almost nothing to do with how much you move, and almost everything to do with copper, collagen, and what is in your food.
Why do joints fail in people who did everything right?
Dr. Allan told me he started seeing younger and younger kids come in with tears, and the explanation they were handed was always the same: you're working too hard, you're lifting too much, you're being pushed. Then he started seeing the same thing in his older clients, who could not recover from a little bit of lifting.
He's had people as young as 37 and 38 get a knee or a hip replaced. When he asked what wild thing they'd been doing, the answer was jogging. A little weightlifting. The more a person moved, the faster their joints seemed to fall apart.
Here is the part that stopped me. My dad poured concrete for 47 years and still has every joint he was born with, except the one that got hit by a bus. Dr. Allan's grandparents farmed by hand for 40 years, walked three or four miles a day into their late seventies, and never had a joint problem. So are we honestly claiming that humans move more today than at any point in history? That isn't what's happening.
Why doesn't this show up on an MRI or a blood test?
Because the damage starts at a scale no standard test is built to catch. What Dr. Allan calls micro tearing is too small to appear on an MRI or an X-ray. You need a fairly large partial thickness tear, or a full tear, before the image shows anything. Until then, you feel it and the picture says nothing.
Bloodwork has the same blind spot. Nobody takes a piece of your ligament, puts it under a microscope, and tells you your collagen isn't cross-linking properly. As Dr. Allan put it, if he were only drawing blood, he'd tell you that you're fine.
That gap is why so many people get told it's in their head, or that it's age, or that they should have stopped running ten years ago. You are not imagining the pain. The test simply isn't looking at the tissue where the problem lives.
What is actually stripping your connective tissue?
Think of healthy collagen as a spring. It stretches, compresses, twists, and comes back. Gram for gram it's stronger than steel. What makes it behave like a spring instead of a dry twig is cross-linking, and the minerals that lock those cross-links together include copper and manganese.
Glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, appears to displace glycine in collagen through what's called analog substitution. Once it's sitting in your tissue, it chelates, meaning it grabs minerals and holds them. It has a wild affinity for copper above all others. Dr. Allan's way of describing it: if he were copper and I were magnesium, glyphosate would grab him a million times before it touched me.
Now picture a rubber band left out in the sun for a month. It looks fine. The first hard pull, it snaps. That's brittle collagen.
The second half is energy. Mitochondria hold roughly 40,000 copper atoms, and copper moves electrons the same way copper wiring moves electricity through your walls. Bigger wire, more current, more power. Strip the copper and you can't make enough ATP to repair the micro tears from yesterday's workout before today's workout adds more. Weakened tissue plus no repair capacity. Then one ordinary jump, one twist getting out of a car, and the ACL goes.
Does any of this sound like your knee, shoulder, or hip?
Over 80 percent of sports injuries today are non-contact. Nobody drove a knee through them. They ran down the field, turned, and the ACL snapped. They landed from a rebound and the Achilles tore. Two NFL quarterbacks tore Achilles last season while essentially just running around.
When you land on one leg, you're putting at least ten times your body weight through that joint. About 90 percent of joint stability comes from muscles contracting correctly around the joint. Ligaments are there to guide, not to hold you together. When the muscle can't fire fast enough to decelerate you, all of that load dumps straight onto the ACL.
For the rest of us it looks quieter. A shoulder that never settles. Adjustments that stop holding. Soreness that hangs on for days. And underneath, a slow misalignment grinding cartilage that has no direct blood supply and no nerve supply, so you don't feel the problem until it's bone on bone.
A real case: two ACL tears in the same knee
Dr. Allan shared this one with me. A 17-year-old boy, about six foot one and 210 pounds, pure muscle, came in on crutches. He'd gone up for a rebound in basketball, landed clean with nobody near him, and the knee came apart: ACL, meniscus, two other ligaments. Surgery, nine months of rehab, cleared to play. Within a month and a half, same knee, same jump, destroyed again.
The second surgeon blamed the first surgeon's angle. Dr. Allan ran his own analysis instead. The muscles themselves had good blood supply and good energy. The problem was in the white tissue: the ligaments and tendons, which have almost no direct blood flow. His quad was completely switched off. Hamstrings off. Pelvic muscles off.
So he mixed copper into a ligament cream and had him apply it to every joint, twice a day, along with an oral copper supplement. At eight weeks, roughly 50 percent better on joint energy, about half his muscles holding. At four months, Dr. Allan couldn't find an energy drop in a single joint, with 85 to 90 percent of muscles staying on. At six months the boy had already been released from physical therapy, compared with nine months the first time around.
His mom was being checked alongside him. She took the oral copper and skipped the cream. After months, her joints hadn't changed at all. That one comparison taught him something he's since watched in about 200 people: the body saturates the heart, liver, kidney, and brain with copper first, and your left knee is far down the priority list. Transdermal is how it gets there.
What I recommend
Stop accepting "you moved too much" as an explanation. If you're active and your joints are failing in your thirties, forties, or fifties, the question worth asking is what's been pulled out of your tissue.
Lower your incoming load where you can. Dr. Allan is honest that organic is better but not clean, because glyphosate binds in soil with a half life measured in decades and gets drawn back up into the plant. Less conventional is still less.
Support the connective tissue minerals directly: copper, manganese, boron. And take seriously that getting copper into ligaments and tendons appears to work best transdermally, applied to every joint you want to keep, not just the one that hurts. Give it four months for a younger body, longer if you're older. Then reassess what your joints can actually do.
Keep lifting. Keep running. Just stop assuming the tissue will hold without the raw materials.
The part I want you to hold onto
Your body should last a hundred years. Your cartilage and synovial fluid were built for that timeline. If your joints are giving out at 40 while your grandparents farmed by hand into their seventies without a complaint, the variable that changed isn't your effort or your age. It's what showed up in the food supply around 1980 and never left.
If you've been told to stop running, stop lifting, stop doing the thing that makes you feel alive, I'd want a second look at your connective tissue before I accepted that sentence. Clean imaging is not the same as a healthy ligament.
Has a doctor ever told you that your joint pain was just from overuse or getting older, even though your scans came back clean? Tell me what they said and what you've been doing since. I read every reply, and I want to know how many of you have been carrying this one alone.
This blog post is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The information shared here reflects Dr. Jaban's clinical perspectives and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.