Don’t Let Knee Pain Keep You From the Activities You Love

Whether you love pounding the pavement each morning for a run or you simply enjoy chasing your kids or grandkids around the yard, being active is an important part of your quality of life. 

Unfortunately, knee pain has other plans for your active lifestyle, and you’ve been begrudgingly sidelined. It may be of some comfort to know that your sideline is full of people who are in the same situation — a whopping 25% of adults in the United States report knee pain.

As providers who specialize in helping patients with painful conditions of all kinds, the team here at World Medical Group dba Neuropathy & Pain Centers of Texas counts knee pain among our many areas of expertise. 

Here, we look at some common causes of knee pain and how we can help you to move freely again.

The many roads to knee pain

Your knees are the largest joints in your body and, arguably, some of the hardest working given that they, literally, carry you around. 

Given this workload, it should come as no surprise that, far and away, the leading driver of knee pain is osteoarthritis (OA), which is a wear-and-tear form of the disease. By the numbers, about 365 million people around the world have knee OA, and this number is growing by the day, thanks to an aging population.

With knee OA, the cartilage that protects the surfaces of the bones inside your joint breaks down. When this happens, not only can your bones rub together painfully, loose pieces of cartilage can float around the joint, exacerbating the discomfort.

While knee OA accounts for more than its fair share of the overall knee pain burden, other roads to knee pain include:

• Ligament tears, including anterior cruciate ligament damage
• Meniscus tears
• Tendon injuries
• Dislocation
• Fractures

We don’t have enough room here to list all of the many possibilities behind knee pain, but the list above represents the most common.

Getting back to moving without knee pain

Since the conditions we outline above have different treatment paths, we’re going to talk about addressing knee pain in broader terms. In our experience, here’s what we’ve found to be most effective in relieving knee pain:

Corticosteroid injections

Arthritis is really a catchall term for joint pain and inflammation. So, one of our frontline treatments — the corticosteroid injection — addresses both of these symptoms. With this injection, we can deliver a local anesthetic for quick pain relief and a steroid that helps relief last longer by reducing inflammation.

Chiropractic care

Your knees can benefit from alignment of your body, which is the focus of chiropractic care. Manual manipulation corrects misalignments in your spine and joints to promote better function.

M6 MLS® (multiwave locked system) robotic laser therapy

With this innovative laser system, we can help soft tissues inside your knees to heal more quickly and strongly.

Physical medicine

Your knees are surrounded by strong muscle groups and, through physical therapy, we can help you strengthen these muscles to take the pressure off of your damaged joints.

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy

One of the issues when it comes to the most common cause of knee pain — knee OA — is that cartilage doesn’t regenerate easily. Our goal is to overcome this hurdle through regenerative medicine in the form of PRP injections, which deliver powerful healing resources to your knee joint.

As you can see, we approach knee pain from almost every angle to bring you relief. To figure out the best way to address your knee pain so that you can get back to your active lifestyle, we invite you to call or message one of our offices in Arlington or Fort Worth, Texas, today to schedule an appointment.