Knee pain can be a nightmare. But with the right specialist on your side, and with a few lifestyle tweaks, you can live a normal life without pain and discomfort.
Osteoarthritis occurs when the cartilage that sits between your bones and cushions their contact wears away. The condition is degenerative, so pain and dysfunction usually progresses with time.
Traditional treatments for arthritis include anti-inflammatory medications and painkillers. But these can have side effects, so you may choose to minimize their use for days of extreme flare-ups.
You can get a lot of relief from arthritis pain with simple steps you take on your own.
When you’re overweight or obese, you put a lot of excess pressure on your joints – especially your hips, ankles, feet, and knees. Each step you take compounds arthritis pain. By losing weight, you reduce joint stress and improve mobility and decrease pain. You may even slow joint damage.
Talk to the experts at STAR Ortho about how you can safely and effectively lose weight. This includes portion control, making healthy food choices at the store and at restaurants, and becoming more physically active.
As an extra bonus, adding more healthy foods, such as tart cherries, fatty fish like salmon, citrus fruits, and cruciferous vegetables, such as cauliflower and broccoli, offer antioxidants, healthy fats, and phytonutrients that help ease the inflammation that aggravates arthritis pain.
Yes, exercise helps you achieve or maintain a healthy weight, but it can also help you ease arthritis pain in other ways. Healthy, gentle, low-impact movement helps you maintain flexibility in your joints. Swimming, for example, can feel almost like a massage as you move and enhance circulation in your shoulders, hips, and feet.
Physical therapy offered at STAR Ortho can also help retrain you how to sit, stand, and move to reduce pain. You learn stretches, strengthening exercises, and light, low-impact cardio that’s appropriate for your level and limitations. Physical therapy has the benefit of improving range of motion, building strength and flexibility around the joints to relieve pressure on them, and enhancing your overall function.
Meditation may sound like new-age baloney, but developing a deep concentration can truly help you deal with arthritis pain. Meditation, along with breath work, progressive relaxation, and guided imagery helps you control stress, which causes your body to produce chemicals that increase inflammation. When you learn how to relax through meditation, you learn how to reduce stress and the associated inflammation.
Research supports the use of meditation to ease the stress caused by arthritis pain and the depression that can sometimes develop as a result. When you start to experience increased pain, you may also breathe deeply to relax muscles that are tensing in response, further easing the pain.
Sit quietly for as little as five minutes, twice a day and work yourself up to longer periods. When you’re feeling overwhelmed by pain, take a pause and breathe deeply four to five times for a count of 10 with each inhale and exhale. With practice, you gain more control over your mental and physical inflammatory response.
At STAR Ortho, we offer numerous solutions for arthritis pain. To learn more about how to put these strategies into play and benefit from medical interventions for your arthritis pain, call the office or schedule an appointment using the online tool.
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