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What is hip and knee pain?

Your hip and knee joints are joints at opposite ends of your thigh (femur) bone.  This knowledge is essential in understanding, diagnosing and treating hip or knee pain.  You must look at both joints to fix hip or knee pain correctly.  Your hip and knees do a lot of work during daily activities.  This work or load causes wear and tear on the joints, leading to injuries.  Injury in your hip or knee can be felt as pain in your lower back, hip, thigh, knee or lower leg region.

Many of the muscles in your leg control hip and knee movement. Injuries or stiffness in your muscles will affect both joints.  These muscle also play a crucial role in your lower back and pelvis.  Without control and strength in your hip and knee muscles, you will experience pain, loss of balance, weakness and stiffness.  Without correct care, this will lead to overuse injuries. 

Wear and tear are the most common pain and injury to your hip and knee.  This may be due to either an active or inactive lifestyle.  Likewise, acute trauma injuries will create short- and long-term pain in your lower back, hips, knees and legs if not treated correctly. 

Types of Hip Injuries

Hip labral tear

The labrum is a cartilage ring surrounding the inside of the hip joint. This labrum helps keep your hip bones aligned and in place as you move.

A tear in your labrum will cause pain in your hip, groin or buttocks.  This is aggravated by walking or running.  You will experience night pain and stiff and limited hip movement.  Commonly, you will experience a clicking or locking sensation in your hip joint when you move. 

Labrum tears are caused by repetitive activities, like dancing, trauma, degeneration or congenital deformities.

Young lady sitting on a bed clutching her left hip in pain. She is wearing light pink long pants and a light grey t-shirt.
Hip/knee osteoarthritis
 

Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis, affecting millions worldwide. It occurs when the protective cartilage that cushions the ends of your bones wears down over time.  Although osteoarthritis can damage any joint, the disorder most commonly affects joints in your hips and knees.

With osteoarthritis, you will experience pain, stiffness, swelling, loss of mobility, and a grinding sensation.

While Osteoarthritis changes cannot be reversed, you can manage the symptoms to try and slow the progression of your degeneration.  Ways to help include staying active and moving, massage and mobilisation, heat and diet.  Reducing the chronic pressure on the joints decreases inflammation and improves how you feel.

Hip Bursitis and tendonitis

Your hip has a fluid-filled sac sitting between the bones, tendons, and muscles; this is called a bursa.  The bursa provides cushioning and smooth movement to your hip.  If your bursa becomes inflamed, you have bursitis.  Bursitis is a painful condition and can lead to loss of movement and weakness.  The most common site for bursitis is the back outside of your hip.  You will experience an ache with tenderness to the touch and stiffness.

Tendons are how your body attaches muscles to bone.  Tendonitis is a condition where the tendon becomes inflamed or swollen.  Hip tendonitis commonly affects the gluteal muscles. This can be from overuse or a rapid increase in your physical activity.  Tendonitis creates pain and loss of movement. The pain is typically worse first in the morning or after prolonged rest.  An exercise to “warm up” typically decreases the pain.  From our experience, tendonitis can progress without the correct care and advice.  

Types of Knee Injuries

A male is standing next to an open road in the country side. He is clutching his right knee as if to hold against pain. He is wearing red sandshoe and black pants and shirt. It is a cleat blue day and the field behind him has short green grass.
Patellofemoral pain syndrome
Patellofemoral pain syndrome, commonly called runners knee

Patellofemoral pain is experienced at the front of your knee and around your kneecap.  You will feel a dull, aching pain and stiffness around your kneecap or above the knee in the thigh muscle.  The pain can be aggravated by walking up or down stairs, kneeling or squatting or after sitting with a bent knee for long periods.

Depending on your activity levels, you will experience a change in your pain levels—patellofemoral pain syndrome responds well to hands-on care. 

 
Knee ligament tear ACL, MCL, PCL, LCL
Ligaments are strong bands of tissue that connect bones.  They provide stability and strength to your joints.  In your knee, you have four major ligaments, known as the ACL (anterior cruciate ligament), PCL (posterior cruciate ligament), MCL (medial collateral ligament) and LCL (lateral collateral ligament).
 
MCL and ACL injuries are the most common knee ligament injuries. These injuries commonly occur as an acute injuries, such as a sudden stop and turn action (think changing direction in soccer or basketball) or direct trauma to your knee.  When you damage a ligament, you will not always experience pain straight away.  Pain begins post injury due to inflammation and damage to other soft tissue in the region.  Instead, you may experience a popping or clicking feeling in your knee.  Followed by a sense of your leg being unstable.  Patients commonly experience a sudden giveaway in the leg.
 
With all knee injuries, the key is early diagnosis and management.  Often diagnosis will require an MRI of your knee.
Knee meniscus tear
 
You have two menisci that sit between your thigh bone (femur) and shin bone (tibia).  They act to protect the lower part of your leg from the shock created by your body weight during activity.  Meniscus tears are a common occurrence.  Meniscus tears commonly occur when there is a twisting force on the knee when your foot is planted and does not move, for example, on the sporting field. However, you can also have chronic meniscus tears when there is excessive force repetitively placed upon the knee from a poor functioning hip joint above.  This will occur over time.  
 
Symptoms you will be experiencing include pain, swelling and catching or locking in the knee joint.  Symptoms are usually on the inside (medial), outside (lateral) or back of the knee.  You will be unable to fully straighten or bend your knee and will walk with a limp. 
Trade worker wearing high vis clothing. and a yellow hard hat. The female worker is sitting clutching her left knee. She has a knee injury from work. Knee injury May require surgery. Knee pain treatment.
Meniscus Injury

How to Fix Common Hip and Knee Injuries?

We treat acute and chronic hip and knee pain at Five Dock Osteopathic and Chiropractic. Our approach is to examine and treat both joints to address the problem’s root cause.
 
The first step is correctly understanding where your knee or hip pain is coming from.  Is your knee pain from the knee, or is it coming from the hip?  Identifying the root cause is essential with hip and knee pain.  Once we have an accurate diagnosis, we treat both the hip and knee and your lower back and leg.  Commonly hip and knee problems affect your surrounding joints.  
 
Hip
As with other joints, mobility always comes first.  Good mobility is followed by improving your hip joint strength and stability.  Hip joint stability is essential for lower back and pelvis control.  Most patients don’t realise they have lost hip stability until we do some simple screening exercises.  This is because the changes have occurred slowly with time.  Improving mobility, strength and stability in all three of these regions reduces the loads upon your joints, reducing your chances of degeneration.  Two essential muscle groups to achieve this are your hamstrings and quadriceps (thigh muscles).  We address any underlying problems with these muscles with a focus on your long-term wellbeing.  Retraining how you move to reduce age-related changes is critical to good movement throughout all ages of your life.            
 
Knee
Acute trauma
RICE (Rest, Ice, Compress & Elevate) After acute injury decreasing swelling and improving blood flow to your soft tissue is step one.  To repair damaged tissues, you need good blood flow to your knee.  We use massage around the thigh and hip to increase blood flow.  Once we have improved your mobility, we will strengthen your knee and hip joints to return your knee stability and control.  You will naturally avoid placing weight on your knee with acute pain.  When you are out of pain, we will return you to your correct movement pattern to prevent long-term degeneration. 
 
Chronic injury 
Working on your whole lower body is critical if you have a long-term knee injury or degeneration.  We improve your mobility in every joint, starting with your knee.  This is followed by addressing any underlying postural changes that have occurred from the injury.  We do this with a structured strength and stability program for your whole lower body.  With the end goal being fully functioning joint strength and mobility.  
 
With hip and knee injuries, we take a dynamic functional focus as hip and knee injuries commonly affect our long-term health span (Number of years you are healthy and active vs your life span).  We understand the importance of these joints for your long-term independence and enjoyment of life.  Most injuries are commonly due to excessive chronic loading from stiffness when the joints are moving.  We decrease chronic pressure while improving joint health to improve the quality of your joints.

What Makes Our Treatment Of Hip and Knee Pain Unique

We have our own unique style of massage developed to complement our adjustments. We are experts at tracing and diagnosing the cause of hip and knee pain to its source. Our treatment then focuses on the whole region. We treat the front (hip flexors, quadriceps,  and adductor muscles) and back (lumbar spine, gluteal, hamstring and lower leg muscles) of the body . This approach focuses on you as a whole person, not a region in isolation. This brings you short-term relief from pain and lasting improvements to your health and well-being. Our adjustments all use traction, making them smooth and gentle on your body. We work with you to devise a personalised functional exercise. Our exercise will stretch and strengthen your hip and knee and build your stability.

What type of hip or knee pain do you have?

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Osteo and chiro can effect your health in many positive ways.
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