You may have tried many knee treatments, medications, and therapies, but are still suffering from knee pain. They may relieve your pain, swelling, snapping or other symptoms, but typically hide your problems or even damage the knee, causing more problems or so-called side effects. Let’s take a closer look at those diagnoses and treatments before we conclude why they do not work but make you keep suffering from knee pain.
Tests and Diagnosis
During the physical exam for your knee pain, your doctor is likely to:
- Inspect your knee for swelling, pain, tenderness, warmth, and visible bruising
- Check to see how far you can move your lower leg in different directions
- Push on or pull the knee joint to evaluate the integrity of the structures in your knee
In some cases, your doctor might suggest imaging tests such as:
- X-ray to help detect bone fractures and degenerative joint disease.
- Computerized tomography (CT) scan to help diagnose bone problems and subtle fractures.
- Ultrasound to produce real-time images of the soft tissue structures within and around your knee.
- Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to check if there are injuries to soft tissues such as ligaments, tendons, cartilage, and muscles.
If your doctor suspects an infection or inflammation in your knee, you’re likely to have blood tests and sometimes a procedure called arthrocentesis, in which a small amount of fluid is removed from within your knee joint with a needle and sent to a laboratory for analysis.
Treatment
Modern medicine treats your knee problems with injections, surgery, medication, and therapies.
Injections
Your doctor may suggest injecting medications or other substances directly into your joint, such as:
- Corticosteroids. Injections of a corticosteroid drug may help reduce the symptoms of an arthritis flare and provide pain relief that may last a few months.
- Hyaluronic acid. A thick fluid, similar to the fluid that naturally lubricates joints, hyaluronic acid can be injected into your knee to improve mobility and ease pain. Relief from one or a series of shots may last as long as six months.
- Platelet-rich plasma (PRP). PRP contains a concentration of many different growth factors that appear to reduce inflammation.
Surgeries
The surgeries include:
- Knee arthroscopy. Depending on your injury, your doctor may use arthroscopy to look at cartilage, bones, and soft tissues inside of your knee. They use the surgery to diagnose knee injuries, repair injured soft tissues and bones, and remove damaged or inflamed tissues.
- Partial knee replacement surgery. This procedure replaces only the most damaged portion of your knee with parts made of metal and plastic.
- Total knee replacement. This procedure replaces your knee with an artificial joint made of metal alloys, high-grade plastics, and polymers.
- Osteotomy. This procedure involves removing bone from the thighbone or shinbone to better align the knee and relieve arthritis pain.
Medications
Your doctor may prescribe medications to just relieve pain and to treat rheumatoid arthritis or gout for the pain.
Physical Therapies
Your doctor or therapist may recommend different types of exercises to strengthen the muscles around your knee to make it more stable and improve your flexibility and balance. They may suggest arch supports, sometimes with wedges on one side of the heel, to help shift pressure away from the side of the knee most affected by osteoarthritis. In certain conditions, different types of braces may be used to help protect and support the knee joint.
For overweight people, they suggest you lose weight first because of the extra weight putting additional pressure on your knee joints.
They may also suggest many other treatments for you to manage your knee pain at home, such as over-the-counter pain medication, ice, rest, elevation, and compression.
Alternative Treatments
Nowadays, there are many alternative therapies and supplements for easing your knee pain such as using:
- Daily exercise to help you reduce pain and/or keep your muscles strong and maintain mobility such as: cycling, walking, swimming or water exercise, tai ji, or yoga.
- Herbal ointment made of cinnamon, ginger, mastic, and sesame oil for putting on your knee to increase circulation and reduce pain.
- Willow bark to help relieve pain and inflammation.
- Ginger extract in many forms, including supplements, ginger tea, and ground spice added to dishes.
All those types of treatments and remedies try to stop the suffering from knee pain but only work to some degree.
Medical treatments may be needed for the acute conditions because only a few energy masters can correct and reconnect broken bones in the world. But none of those modern treatments and remedies can stop the suffering from knee pain and get rid of knee problems permanently. Why? They only focus on your knees for your knee pain. But in most cases, your knee problems are not originate from just your knees. The body is a complete system and every part of it works together as well as performing its own functions. Your entire body from head to toes can affect your knees! It is just that your knees are easy to get bad circulation therefore makes the symptoms easy to show up in your knees. Your gout problems may happen in your knee or other joints. But the weakness in many other parts and organs of your body may cause your knee inflammation as well as the knee itself. If you do not take care of other related problems in the other parts of the body that affect your knee, they cannot fix your knee problems permanently. Further,
- Surgeries often produce more injuries. You, including your body, need to work harder to clean up the injuries in addition to work on your existing problems.
- Medicines and drugs create more toxins. You need to work harder to clean up the poisonous toxins in addition to working on your existing problems.
With my help, a person without surgery, medication, and complex or severe health problems typically needs just a month to get rid of knee problems. But a person with those needs 3-6 months or even longer to get rid of their knee and related problems.
In the next couple of posts, I will discuss the major problems in the body that can cause knee symptoms and the right way of healing knee problems including its pain, swallow, cracking voice, etc.. But if you or your friends and loved ones need help with knee problems now, do not hesitate to contact me directly or check out here to start working with me.