The patella - important anatomical relationships

The patella is a bone within a tendon - the tendon of the long quadriceps muscle that spans the region from the hip to the shinbone. The illustration on the right shows one part of the quadriceps muscle (the rectur femoris part) and you can see the patella within its tendon just at the knee joint.

There are quite a lot of medical words that need to be absorbed before one can confidently talk about the patella and its problems, and the extensor mechanism falls into that group.