More than half of American adults over the age of 45 suffer from some form of arthritis. Arthritis is an umbrella term for over 100 conditions that cause joint inflammation, leading to painful symptoms and joint tissue damage.
At Kane Orthopedic Institute, we understand how devastating it can be to live with chronic pain and how it can impact your daily life. To support you in managing arthritis, our experts have shared the top five ways to improve your quality of life and alleviate pain.
Overuse is one of the main reasons people develop arthritis. Overuse of the joints can happen due to carrying excess weight, lifting too heavy weights, or simply living long enough to accumulate the wear and tear of everyday life.
However, not everyone past a certain age suffers from arthritis. If overuse of the joints makes arthritis worse, then how can exercise make it better? Strengthening the surrounding muscles is the key to avoiding overuse of the joints.
It is key to work with a physical therapist to learn which exercises to perform to reduce strain on problematic joints.
Alongside a tailored exercise plan, walking, yoga, tai chi, and other low-impact exercises are great for stabilizing the joints without overusing them.
As mentioned previously, inflammation is sometimes caused by overuse. Excess weight is one of the most common reasons your joints work harder. You can fix this by staying at a healthy weight and increasing the strength in the muscles surrounding your joints.
An easy way to determine whether you are at a healthy weight is to enter your weight, age, and height into an online BMI calculator.
Heat and cold therapy are clever ways to trick your body into lowering inflammation and pain. Heat increases vasodilation, which boosts blood flow and oxygen to the affected areas, stimulating tissue healing. Heat on the skin can also interfere with the pain signals sent to your brain. After heat has done its job, cold exposure can constrict blood flow in the area, reducing inflammation levels and numbing the pain.
The combination of the two helps stimulate the body’s defense mechanisms, promoting new, healthy tissue growth in the joint and reducing inflammation.
Fortunately, many of the big drivers of inflammation are due to controllable factors such as diet, stress, and exposure to pollutants.
Potential causes of inflammation include:
An assessment of your lifestyle and environment, followed by a few positive changes, can significantly reduce inflammation levels.
As much as our experts love helping their patients get better using conservative methods, sometimes surgery is necessary to remove the damaged tissue and allow you to live a pain-free life. Our experts use minimally invasive arthroscopic surgery, which involves only a couple of small incisions through which a thin tube with a camera is inserted to assess and remove any damage to your tissues.
Arthroscopic surgery is associated with reduced scarring, reduced bleeding, and a shorter recovery time.
You don’t have to live with chronic pain. From guiding you to make changes to your lifestyle to physical therapy, medications, and minimally invasive surgery, there are plenty of options to choose from based on your unique situation. Don’t live with the pain any longer; contact us to schedule an appointment so we can find a solution together.
