A common condition among older adults, osteoarthritis, develops when the cartilage that usually serves as a cushion in a joint wears away, leaving bone to rub against bone.
The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons estimates that more than 8 million Americans older than age 45 suffer from osteoarthritis of the knee. Are you one of them?
First Steps
For osteoarthritis of the knee, it is first recommended that you lose any extra weight to take some pressure off the joints. Similarly, it is recommended that you follow an exercise program to strengthen the muscles around the joints.
Actually, exercise is considered the most effective nondrug treatment for osteoarthritis because strong muscles help support and protect the joints affected by arthritis! Walking and swimming are among the most recommended exercises for osteoarthritis patients.
Regardless of what treatment you and your physician decide is best for you, physical therapy and daily exercise should be the first step in your treatment plan.
We can help with both of these, as well as providing manual therapies to relieve the pain.
Stepping It Up
To supplement our exercise programs and manual therapies, ice packs, heat application and over-the-counter pain relievers can help alleviate pain too.
If that’s still not enough, in recent years a number of new other treatments have been developed for patients with advanced osteoarthritis.
One of them, cooled radiofrequency ablation, relieves pain by deactivating certain nerves in the knee. It is usually performed on people for whom conservative treatments have failed but who are too young or too old for knee replacement surgery.
Another new nonsurgical procedure, cryoneuromodulation, injects tiny needles frozen to –126° into the skin to kill targeted sensory nerves around the knee, thus preventing the nerves from transmitting pain signals. Pain relief from one session can last up to six months—in many cases, enough to help patients through a physical therapy regimen.
Next Steps
If you suffer from knee osteoarthritis that doesn’t seem to go away: give us a call for an appointment.
We can work with you and your physician to develop an individualized exercise routine. A regular exercise routine will deliver long-term pain relief that will last well beyond the effects of any short-term measures.
We also work with some of the brightest minds in the field of Pain Management, and can help even in the most severe of cases.
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