Your ball-and-socket hip joint is unique in that it stabilizes and bears your body weight, but it also allows you great flexibility. Since the hip enables essential and different types of movement, hip pain can halt life as you knew it.
The caring provider team at Advanced Spine and Pain (ASAP) specializes in treating hip pain successfully, whatever its source. Our services don’t stop at hip treatment, either. ASAP provides a wide range of treatments that alleviate hip pain and allow you to get back to your normal life and activities.
As we mentioned, your hip is both sturdy and flexible. This joint allows you to:
The top of your femur (thigh bone) fits within your hip socket. Your hip’s components include bones, ligaments, tendons, muscles, and the synovial membrane and fluid. The synovial membrane envelops your joint, and the fluid lubricates it.
The ingenious design of your hip joint’s enables you to walk, run, and jump.
Unfortunately, hip pain is quite common and often due to osteoarthritis, especially as you get older. In fact, over 50% of older adults experience bouts of hip pain. Though age leads to hip pain in a broader sense, we frequently see quite a few other causes as well, including:
We often think of osteoarthritis when we think of joint disease, but there are many others that lead to hip discomfort. These include rheumatoid arthritis, gout, spondyloarthritis (a group of disorders that cause both spinal and joint inflammation), lupus (an autoimmune disease), and bursitis.
We investigate the possibility of these and other causes when you visit us complaining of hip pain.
This disease weakens your bones and makes them brittle, so much so that even a minor mishap can cause a fracture. Osteoporosis-related fragility fractures can range from minor to a complete break.
Even if you don’t have osteoporosis, you can suffer a fracture from a traumatic injury, like a fall or a car accident.
Repetitive motion can lead to a fracture as well, so if your job is physical, you may experience more hip pain than someone who does less physically demanding work.
Hip pain is a symptom of bone cancer, but pain that’s related to cancer is more often the result of another type of cancer elsewhere in the body metastasizing and traveling to the hip.
You’re at risk for hip sprain or strain if the ligaments that are attached to your hip are overstretched, or your muscle tears. With these problems, you may notice that the pain is concentrated more above your hip and that it gets worse the more you use it. You might also note a decrease in flexibility and strength.
Your nerve becomes pinched when tissues apply pressure to it. When the pinched nerve is in your hip area, it can affect your gait and limit movement. You might feel either dull or severe pain, tingling or burning, and even numbness down your leg. Similar to hip sprains and strains, movement makes hip pain worse when you have a compressed nerve.
These are just a sampling of the many causes of hip pain. Seek treatment if you have hip pain, because it takes concerted effort for our team to make an accurate diagnosis and develop a good treatment plan.
We’re dedicated to freeing you from hip discomfort and restoring your mobility. Fortunately, we have many innovative treatments in our tool box. These include:
Stem cell therapy and PRP treatments are exciting new approaches that harness your body’s own healing power to relieve your hip pain. We harvest your own stem cells and blood plasma (which we separate and concentrate) and reintroduce them into your body via injection to hasten healing. These treatments create healthy cells to replace your damaged ones.
If your hip damage is severe, surgery may be the right answer, in which case we perform total joint replacement so you can enjoy full movement, without pain, once again.
If you suffer from chronic hip pain, take the important step to call us and schedule an appointment, or request one through our website.
