If you are suffering from painful joints, you are hardly alone. Chronic joint pain caused by arthritis alone affects millions of people in the United States. In fact, approximately 25% of adults with arthritis report experiencing severe joint pain, while nearly 50% of adults with arthritis have persistent pain.

There are numerous ways to effectively manage it. Let’s talk about some of those helpful ways, and where you can go in Caldwell for outstanding and long-lasting pain relief from a skilled physician.

How Can I Control My Joint Pain?

Here are 10 tips that can help relieve your joint discomfort and improve your quality of life:

1. Strengthen the muscles surrounding your painful joint. Even moderate exercise, such as walking or casual cycling, can strengthen the muscles around an arthritic joint – thereby providing greater mobility and less pain. When your muscles are strong, they take some of the pressure that would otherwise be more fully placed directly onto the joint, such as on the knees when walking. In other words, the impact is more evenly distributed onto the muscles as well.
2. Practice non-impact cardio exercises. Calisthenics help build muscle endurance and elevate your heart rate without placing undue stress on your joints. Riding a stationary bicycle (“spinning”) is a good example of suitable non-impact cardio exercise.
3. Don’t overdo physical activities at home or at work. Avoid excessive bending, kneeling, or lifting. If possible, perform physical tasks throughout the week rather than doing everything in one day.
4. Avoid frequent trips up and downstairs. If you are experiencing severe joint pain in your hips or knees, avoid climbing and descending stairs too often. It is also a good idea to take one step at a time: Step onto a stair, then place the other foot on the same step. Then take the next step in the same way. This takes some pressure off the knees.
5. Take over-the-counter pain medication. Taken as directed, OTC medication helps relieve minor joint pain. Do not take too much; if you find yourself needing to take this medicine every day, see a pain specialist about alternatives that will not cause liver damage and other issues which can develop from taking too much pain medicine.
6. Reduce pain with hot and cold therapy. Heat relaxes muscles around a painful joint, but if the joint is already warm and swollen, apply a cold pack – with a cloth or thin towel between the pack and your skin – instead. Heat therapy helps to increase blood flow and circulation, whereas cold therapy helps to reduce excessive blood flow, inflammation, swelling, and nerve activity.
7. Use a mobility aid to relieve pressure on the affected joint. A cane, crutch, or walker will help relieve stress on a painful knee or hip joint. Be sure to use the cane or crutch on the opposite side of your body from the affected joint.
8. Maintain a healthy weight for your height and build. Eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly to prevent excess body weight from placing stress on your knees and hips.
9. Eliminate potential hazards in your home. There are steps you can take to be able to get around your home more safely and easily with an arthritic joint. These steps include adding grab bars in the bathroom, maintaining good lighting throughout, securing rugs to the floor (or otherwise removing them if they are a tripping hazard), and exercising caution when getting in and out of bed in the dark – all of which will help prevent a fall or other accident.
10. Look for ways to relieve stress. Activities such as stretching, meditating, and mindful breathing can help calm your body and make your arthritic joints feel better.

Alternative Joint Pain Treatment Options

If the above self-help tips fail to relieve your joint pain, there are effective, innovative regenerative medicine treatments that are now available. These include:

• Ozone injection treatments – Ozone-oxygen joint injections reduce inflammation and help the joint regenerate. Oxygen ozone infusions also help to reduce joint pain and body-wide inflammation as well as boost the immune system.
• Stem cell treatments for joint arthritis – Our stem cells continuously repair and regenerate our bodies. Regenerative medicine uses your own cells and growth factors to treat a variety of painful joint conditions without using medication. Because the cells are from your own body, you will not experience any natural rejection of the treatment.
• Photo-activated PRP treatments – Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy involves injections of a concentration of platelets derived from your own blood sample. The platelets are harnessed to accelerate the healing of injured tendons, ligaments, muscles, and joints. Photo-activated PRP is even more potent than standard PRP: It uses three different wavelengths of light to activate the growth factors in your platelets, which are then injected into a damaged joint to promote more powerful healing.

Joint Pain Doctor in Caldwell, New Jersey

Here at Alternative Disc Therapy, we treat pain in the back, knees, hips, shoulders, and virtually any joint and muscle group in the body that is suffering pain. Our own Dr. Warren Bleiweiss is a national leader in administering oxygen-ozone disc injection treatments for pain relief, and he is here to help you. Our treatments are renowned for helping patients to achieve pain relief without surgery or medication.

If you have any questions or would like to schedule an appointment with Dr. Bleiweiss, contact our friendly staff today by calling (973) 403-3334 or by filling out our appointment request form online. We look forward to serving you!

 

External links:

Joint pain cases – https://www.cdc.gov/arthritis/pain/index.htm

• Kennedy J, Roll JM, Schraudner T, Murphy S, McPherson S. Prevalence of persistent pain in the US adult population: new data from the 2010 National Health Interview Survey. J Pain. 2014;15(10):979–984.

Managing joint pain – Hospital for Special Surgery – https://www.hss.edu/article_managing-arthritis-pain.asp