Knee Pain
Don’t Let It Stop You
Do you suffer from knee pain? Does it hurt to walk? Are you avoiding doing the things you love because they’re painful? We understand how debilitating it can be. But you don’t have to live in pain, and you can get your range of motion back. You can also prevent knee pain from recurring. We believe one of the first steps in finding knee pain relief is understanding your pain, how your knees work, and what’s causing the pain in the first place.
How Your Knees Work
An understanding of a brief anatomy of the knee will help explain how your knees work. Your knees are the largest joints in your body, and are made up of 4 main components:
- Bones
- Cartilage
- Ligaments
- Tendons
Bones
Your knee joint is where 3 bones meet: your thigh bone (femur), shin bone (tibia), and kneecap (patella).
Cartilage
Articular Cartilage is a slippery substance that coats the ends of the femur and tibia. In a healthy knee, the cartilage allows your knee bones to glide smoothly across each other as you walk, run, or bend the knee.
Ligaments
Your knee ligaments connect your thigh bone to your shine bone. Collateral ligaments are on the sides of your knee and control sideways motion. Cruciate ligaments are inside your knee joint in the front and back, and control backward and forward motion. The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) is in the front, and the posterior cruciate ligament is in the back of the knee.
Tendons
Tendons connect your muscles to your knee. The quadriceps tendon connects your thigh muscles to your kneecap, while your patellar tendon stretches from your kneecap to your shin bone.
Knee pain occurs when the parts are not working together correctly.
Knee Pain Symptoms
The quality of your knee pain can give a clue as to what is causing it. It may feel like your knee bones are grinding together, or you may experience sharp, tearing pain. You may also experience a dull ache. In addition to pain, you may have these symptoms:
- Swelling
- Deformity
- Stiffness
- Redness
- Warm to the touch
- Weakness or instability
- Inability to straighten the knee
- Popping or crunching sounds
What Causes Knee Pain?
Knee pain affects people of all ages, from young children to the elderly. Finding the root cause of your knee pain is crucial to getting you the care you need so that you can stop the pain and prevent it in the future.
Some common causes of knee pain include:
- Osteoarthritis
- Rheumatoid arthritis
- Gout
- Fracture
- ACL injury
- Torn meniscus
- Bursitis
- Tendinitis
- Iliotibial band syndrome
- Dislocated kneecap
- Hip or foot pain
- Falling
- Obesity
Knee Pain FAQs
Q: What can cause knee pain without injury?
A: Arthritis, gout, infection, and obesity can all cause knee pain without injury.
Q: Can sciatica cause knee pain?
A: Yes. The sciatic nerve extends from your lower back, around your hip and down the front of your leg to your knee. Inflammation of the nerve can cause back pain, hip pain, and knee pain.
Q: What causes pain behind the knee?
A: Two common causes of pain behind the knee are a posterior cruciate ligament injury and a popliteal cyst, or collection of fluid behind the knee.
Q: How do I know if my knee pain is serious?
A: Your knee pain is serious if it persists for more than a few days and is preventing you from doing your activities of daily living. You should see a doctor if:
- Your knee is unstable or gives out, or you can’t bear weight.
- You have substantial knee swelling.
- You can’t fully extend or flex your knee.
- There’s an obvious deformity in your knee or leg.
- You have a fever, as well as pain, redness, and swelling in your knee.
- Your severe knee pain is associated with an injury. (Fall, sports injury, car accident injury)
Q: What do I do to relieve knee pain?
A: Minor knee pain can respond well to anti-inflammatories, rest, ice, compression, and elevation (RICE). Moderate-to-severe knee pain, whether acute or chronic needs professional attention and a visit to the doctor.
How Cima Health Can Help
Cima Health provides restorative, lifelong solutions that target the root cause of your knee pain. Your care will start out with a comprehensive evaluation to assess your pain. We will also ask questions about your work and home life, lifestyle, and habits before making recommendations for an integrative plan of care. Together, we come up with conservative and alternative treatments that can help you achieve whole-body wellness and live pain-free for life.
Treating and preventing knee pain involves several treatment modalities, all of which you can receive in one location. They include:
- Chiropractic Care
- Joint Injections
- Physical Therapy
- Physical Fitness
- Massage Therapy
Let’s take a look at how each of these areas works together to provide you with natural pain relief and inspires you to make lifestyle changes to prevent knee pain in the future.
Chiropractic Care
Chiropractic care may provide nearly immediate knee pain relief, depending on the underlying cause of your pain. Chiropractic adjustments, manual therapy, dry needling, and Class IV laser treatment can all help relieve your pain. Regular chiropractic care may also help you avoid surgery.
Our Palm Beach Gardens chiropractors are all highly trained professionals and include:
Working with knee pain
Working with knee pain can be difficult, if not excruciating, depending on your job. Regular chiropractic adjustments can help tremendously. But if your job requires you to stand all day or walk a lot, you may need work accommodations until your knee heals and you return to full duty.
Your chiropractor can recommend work restrictions to your employer if needed, such as desk duty, being allowed to sit instead of stand, no squatting, etc. This is especially true if you are seeing the chiropractor as part of a worker’s compensation claim. Your doctor will discuss this with you as necessary.
Joint Injections
In addition to chiropractic care for hip pain relief, your team may determine you would benefit from joint injections. Our medical care team administers several types of joint injections for our patients suffering from knee pain.
Steroid Injections
Known as corticosteroid injections, steroid injections can provide immediate knee pain relief. You will be limited to a certain number of steroid injections each year because of potential side effects. And of course, our goal is to help you find pain relief through other modalities, including physical therapy, weight loss, exercise, and more.
Massage Therapy
Massage therapy can also play a role in your weight loss plans. Massage can reduce stress, and therefore stress eating. It can also reduce muscle, back, and joint pain, which are keeping you inactive. Massage can also be helpful in recovering after a workout. Regular massage can also reduce anxiety, make you feel more relaxed, and improve your sleep.
Visco Supplementation/ Hyaluronic Acid Injections
We may recommend hyaluronic acid (HA) injections if you don’t respond to corticosteroid injections. HA is also a better treatment if you have diabetes, because steroid injections can raise your blood sugar levels.
Platelet-Rich Plasma Injections
Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) therapy is another treatment where we help your body heal itself. Using your own plasma, we can help your body heal tissue, tendons, and muscles faster.
Physical Therapy (PT)
Physical therapy, when combined with other treatments can also help with knee pain. PT can be crucial after knee replacement surgery to help you make a full recovery where you walk pain-free. We may use manual therapy, joint mobilization, laser therapy, and other treatments to address your knee pain and help you heal.
We will develop an exercise and stretching program to help you get knee pain relief as well as increase your mobility and flexibility. You will be able to do many of these exercises and stretches for knee pain at home as well as with your physical therapist at Cima Health.
Massage Therapy
Massage therapy is another modality we offer that can complement the other treatments. Targeted, therapeutic massage can reduce inflammation, pain, and stiffness. Massage therapy stimulates the muscles, tendons, and blood vessels in your knee, improving circulation and bringing in new joint fluid. Massage therapy can be especially helpful for patients with osteoarthritis. And of course, massage will also relax you and improve your mental wellbeing.
Physical Fitness
The last component of preventing knee pain is becoming physically fit. Whether you’ve recovered from surgery and want to get stronger or you want to prevent knee injuries while running, or playing tennis, we can help. If you’re overweight, those excess pounds can put a strain on your knees.
Our physical fitness team of personal trainers can help develop an exercise and weight loss regimen tailored to you that reduces your knee pain and helps prevent it from returning in the future. We will also focus on injury prevention, if a sports injury or running injury is what brought you through our doors.
The entire team at Cima Health works together to provide you with coordinated care and restorative, lifelong solutions.
See What Our Patients Have to Say
Book an Appointment
Knee pain can make it hard to do simple things like walk down the stairs or take your dog for a walk. If you’re looking for a conservative treatment for knee pain, book an appointment today. One of our chiropractors will do a comprehensive examination to get to the root cause of your pain and develop an integrative plan of care to relieve your pain and inspire you to achieve whole-body wellness.
