Knee pain can happen to anyone, anytime. The complexity of the knee and the constant pressures placed on it throughout the day make it vulnerable to injury, including overuse injures such as osteoarthritis.
There is a multitude of options that people can use to alleviate knee pain and address the underlying cause. Knowing your options allows you and your doctor to find the solution that’s best for you.
What Can I Do for Knee Pain?
Treatments for knee pain fall into one of three categories: lifestyle changes, medications, and surgery. Here’s a rundown on each of these areas and how they may work for relieving your knee pain:
Lifestyle Changes
Doctors often recommend one or more lifestyle changes when providing answers on how to deal with knee pain. Your doctor may advise you to perform stretching exercises that can help to relieve your knee pain and help retain flexibility. Mild activities such as walking also help to keep the muscles of the knee strong, keeping further injury at bay.
Overweight individuals will also benefit from weight loss, since a lower weight puts less stress on the knees. In this case, your doctor will recommend a combination of proper diet and increased physical activity.
Medications
The conventional treatments for people with knee pain include over-the-counter anti-inflammatory pain relievers. These medicines temporarily block some of the pain signals coming from your injured knee, providing relief for several hours at a time. Unfortunately, these analgesics only deal with the pain, and they are unable to address the underlying inflammation.
A popular treatment option is a corticosteroid injection into the affected knee by your doctor. These injections provide immediate and lasting pain relief that can last for months.
Surgery
An option for treating chronic and severe knee pain is surgery. While knee surgery used to be a very invasive procedure, arthroscopy now allows doctors to perform minimally invasive knee operations.
In arthroscopy, the surgeon makes a small incision and uses a thin tube with a tiny camera function at the end – this instrument is called an arthroscope. The physician can then view the internal structures of the knee in real-time and remove or repair damaged tissue. As the procedure is minimally invasive, patients recover faster and encounter fewer side effects than with traditional open surgery.
Knee replacement surgery, whether partial or total, can now be performed as a minimally invasive procedure called arthroplasty. In this operation, the surgeon will remove some or all of the knee joint and replace it with prosthetic materials. Once healed, the new knee will function just like the original knee, but with less or no pain.
Knee Pain Treatment in West Jersey
Knee pain used to be an unsolvable problem for many people. Nowadays, modern medicine gives patients several options for managing knee pain. In addition to lifestyle changes, there is a multitude of medications and surgical procedures that provide thousands of patients every day the pain-free life they deserve.
If you are in or near Dover, New Jersey, schedule a consultation with an experienced orthopedist here at Orthopedic Associates of West Jersey. We offer many types of knee pain treatments, giving our patients long-lasting relief from their pain.
Call us today at (973) 989-0888 or use our online appointment request form now to schedule a consultation with a skilled orthopedic physician, and find out more about how we can help you achieve relief from your knee pain for good.
