About Mark

My name is Mark Donovan. I'm a building inspector based in Burlington, Vermont, and before that I spent more than thirty years as a carpenter — framing, finish work, renovation, all of it. My knees paid for it. The trouble started in my late thirties. Years of kneeling on concrete, aggregate, rough subfloor, crawl-space gravel. Add in the ladder work and the carrying and the not-great habits that come with a young tradesman who thinks he's indestructible, and you get a pair of knees that started making their opinion known around the time I turned thirty-eight. I didn't go looking for a diagnosis. I went looking for gear that would let me keep working. That's been the project for the last fifteen-plus years: figure out which braces, sleeves, compression products, ice machines, foam rollers, and other equipment are actually worth buying, and which ones fall apart in the first season. I've tested somewhere around twenty-five to thirty products. Most were fine. Several were excellent. A few were a waste of money. I write about what held up and what didn't, using the conditions I actually work in: job sites, crawl spaces, rough floors, long days on your feet. I'm not a physical therapist. I'm not an orthopedist. I'm a tradesman who figured out what works for his knees through fifteen years of trial and error, and I write about it in plain language. If you have a clinical question — diagnosis, treatment, what to do after surgery — that's not my territory. Talk to your doctor. What I can tell you is what held up on the job and what didn't.