Joint pain treatment Scottsdale: understand the soreness and your choices

The timing and location of soreness help explain its cause

Your soreness may build during a walk, a golf swing, or repeated lifting. It may ease when you rest and return during the same task. Arthritis can cause stiffness, less motion, and aching after the joint works. A tendon, the strong band joining muscle to bone, may hurt during one exact lift or reach. A back or hip problem can send an ache elsewhere. The painful spot may not be where the ache begins.

Note the time, the sore place, and the motion that starts it again.

Gentle motion and less work often ease the ache

Complete rest can make your joint stiffer. Keep moving in ways that feel safe for you, but reduce the work that caused soreness. Try a short, flat walk instead of a long downhill one. Heat may loosen a stiff joint before activity. Ice may soothe it after a busy day. Before taking drugstore medicine, ask a doctor or pharmacist whether it is safe with your health and other drugs.

An exam makes sense when soreness still limits sleep, stairs, or walking.

An office exam checks the joint and the places around it

Tell the doctor when your ache began and which tasks make it worse. The doctor will check motion, strength, swelling, and the nearby joints. An X-ray can show wear or damage inside the joint. Yet the X-ray can't prove that the wear caused today's soreness. Bring old test reports and a short list of tasks that have become hard. That information helps the doctor match the exam to daily trouble.

PRP, or platelet-rich plasma, is regenerative care QC Kinetix medical providers offer after spinning your blood to gather platelets for the sore joint at its Scottsdale office.

Sources

1. In 113 patients with end-stage hip disease undergoing hip replacement (patients with coexisting knee or spine pathology excluded), the commonest pain sites before surgery were groin, anterior thigh, buttock, ANTERIOR KNEE and greater trochanter. Pain was also recorded in areas not normally considered hip referral zones: lower back in 21.2%, shin in 7.1% and calf in 2.7%. Low back pain was significantly more common in patients with longer symptom duration. Regardless of pattern, 97.3% reported complete pain relief within 12 weeks of hip replacement.

   Hsieh PH, Chang Y, Chen DW, Lee MS, Shih HN, Ueng SWN — Pain distribution and response to total hip arthroplasty: a prospective observational study in 113 patients with end-stage hip disease.. Journal of Orthopaedic Science, 2012. DOI: 10.1007/s00776-012-0204-1.

2. OARSI's 2019 guideline is the only major osteoarthritis guideline that grades treatments separately for people with disease in MULTIPLE joints. Its Core Treatments for polyarticular OA are arthritis education and structured land-based exercise. Critically, intra-articular corticosteroid and intra-articular hyaluronic acid were Level 1B/2 options for knee OA only and were NOT recommended for hip or polyarticular OA; oral NSAIDs were not recommended at all for people with cardiovascular comorbidity or frailty; and paracetamol/acetaminophen was conditionally not recommended.

   Bannuru RR, Osani MC, Vaysbrot EE, et al. — OARSI guidelines for the non-surgical management of knee, hip, and polyarticular osteoarthritis.. Osteoarthritis and Cartilage, 2019. DOI: 10.1016/j.joca.2019.06.011.

3. A systematic review of 33 studies reporting CT or MRI findings in 3,110 people with NO symptoms found that degenerative changes are close to universal with age. Disc degeneration was present in 37% of 20-year-olds and 96% of 80-year-olds; disc bulge in 30% at 20 and 84% at 80; disc protrusion in 29% at 20 and 43% at 80. The authors concluded that many imaging-based degenerative features are likely part of normal ageing and unassociated with pain.

   Brinjikji W, Luetmer PH, Comstock B, et al. — Systematic literature review of imaging features of spinal degeneration in asymptomatic populations.. American Journal of Neuroradiology, 2015. DOI: 10.3174/ajnr.A4173.

4. The 2019 ACR/Arthritis Foundation guideline makes STRONG recommendations for exercise, weight loss in people with overweight or obesity, self-efficacy and self-management programmes, tai chi, cane use, hand orthoses for first-CMC joint OA, tibiofemoral bracing, topical NSAIDs for the knee, oral NSAIDs and intra-articular glucocorticoid injections for the knee; acupuncture, thermal modalities, radiofrequency ablation, acetaminophen, duloxetine and tramadol are only conditional.

   Kolasinski SL, et al. — 2019 American College of Rheumatology/Arthritis Foundation Guideline for the Management of Osteoarthritis of the Hand, Hip, and Knee.. Arthritis Rheumatol, 2020. DOI: 10.1002/art.41142.