The Top Elgin Knee Osteoarthritis Treatment: Exercise
Knee pain…the likelihood that you experience or will experience knee pain or know someone suffering with knee pain is high. Knee pain caused by osteoarthritis is a familiar condition around the world. Connected Chiropractic promotes exercise to our our Elgin chiropractic knee pain patients. We know we come across sounding like a broken record on exercise, but exercise remains ‘king’ when it comes to knee pain care! And other new knee pain research touts a few new treatment approaches to try, too.
OSTEOARTHRITIS
Osteoarthritis (OA) is a disease of degenerated cartilage or wear and tear harm to cartilage giving rise to disability and other health problems impacting over 500 million adults around the world. Hip OA and knee OA are two of the most common types with knee OA being the most common. The goal of treatment of OA is management and decrease of symptoms, not cure. Drug approaches consist of NSAIDs while non-drug approaches include exercise (walking), aerobic exercise, weight loss, diet, hot/cold therapy, electrotherapy to improve muscle strength and decrease joint pain. Surgery (arthroscopy and joint replacement therapy) was explained to be a last treatment option. The authors of this paper emphasized that precautions to keep joints healthy and disease-free were suitable and necessary. (1) Those are hopeful goals.
DESIRED RESULTS OF TREATMENT FOR KNEE OA
How do you determine if an intervention is successful to your pain? Your hoped for outcome is the most important. For osteoarthritis, one of the bigger diseases that disables us humans, walking for pleasure was documented by data collected for the Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) to be statistically significant for managing knee osteoarthritis at the genetic level. (2) Today’s researchers are also working to define just what “minimal clinically important change” is, what the minimum improvement a patient like you would perceive or say made going through the treatment was worthwhile. For patients with osteoarthritis who went through non-surgical treatments, the amount of knee flexion they could do after treatment was from 3.8 to 6.4 degrees. Other pertinent information researchers uncovered from the 72 studies they analyzed was that an increase in flexion was associated with lessened pain and increased function. (3) These are positive outcomes!
…AND WHAT ABOUT PLASMA-RICH PLATELET THERAPY?
In the non-surgical realm of treatment for knee osteoarthritis, platelet rich plasma (PRP) injection has grown in availability alongside traditional exercise for knee OA pain. A randomized control trial contrasted three treatment combinations PRP injection alone (three weekly injections), exercise alone (6 weeks program/12 sessions of strengthening and functional exercise), and PRP with exercise. At 24 weeks post treatments, the PRP didn’t impact pain in mild-to-mode knee OA patients weighed against exercise alone. As a matter of fact, the exercise alone group outcomes were clinically superior for function and health related quality of life. Even though the PRP added cost to the combined treatment, it did not show itself to be superior to exercise alone either. The researchers concluded with the statement that exercise alone was recommended to decrease pain and improve function. (4) Certainly, more studies will continue to document the efficacy of such treatments as PRP.
CONTACT Connected Chiropractic
Listen to this PODCAST on Osteoarthritis of the Knee with Dr. Luigi Albano on The Back Doctors Podcast with Dr. Michael Johnson as he details the effective gentle, adapted protocols of The Cox® Technic System of Spinal Pain Management in treating the osteoarthritic knee! A helpful, relieving treatment approach to incorporate with exercise!
Make your Elgin chiropractic appointment today. From what we read, it seems like exercise is still ‘king’ when managing osteoarthritis of the knee. We can help you find the right exercises and even incorporate some distraction to help the knee.
