Pain Management Options For Dealing With Knee Arthritis

Arthritis affecting the knee is a common problem affecting millions of Americans every year. There are numerous types of problems that lead to be arthritis. The most common would be normal wear and tear arthritis. The problem is the knee is wearing out from lack of cartilage.

As humans, we continue to make cartilage similarly to when we were younger, however, the rate at which we lose cartilage is increased significantly from when we were younger. The ratio of producing cartilage to losing cartilage thus changes and the end result is one has a decreased amount of cartilage resulting in arthritis.

Treatments for knee arthritis are termed quality of life treatments. Arthritis is not fatal and surgery is a quality of life decision so nonoperative treatments should be tried first and foremost. Activity avoidance is one treatment, which basically means if it hurts just don’t do it. This may include running, tennis, golf, etc. To certain people, this may be okay.

But in this day and age with Americans desiring to stay very active, probably not acceptable to most. The next treatments are as follows:

1. Cane – A cane may offload over 50% of the weight on the arthritic knee during walking.
2. Pain Medications – Over the counter analgesic medications include Tylenol or NSAIDS (Aleve, Advil, Ibuprofen) and then there are narcotic medications for short term usage from an AZ Pain Doctor.
3. Knee injections – Injections into the knee range from the usual steroid injections which can be extremely effective to a substance like hyaluronic acid which works fairly well promoting joint lubrication. At a certain extreme of arthritis, the hyaluronic acid injections no longer provide benefit.
4. Physical Therapy – Working on strengthening muscles around the knee can offload the stresses to the joint and provide pain relief with Arizona Physical Therapy.
5. TENS Unit – stands for Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation – may provide pain relief on an as needed basis.
6. Acupuncture – Arizona acupunture has been shown in numerous research studies to work well for osteoarthritis.
7. Knee Bracing – Can offload the arthritic parts of the knee that are causing pain. This can allow for nonoperative pain relief.
8. Surgery, If all of the nonsurgical treatments fail, knee replacement has been shown to consistently rank in the top 5 quality of life operations in existence. There are lesser options too depending on where the arthritis is and whether or not it’s focal or diffuse.

None of these treatments actually fix arthritis. They are designed to alleviate symptoms and prevent the need for surgery.

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