4 Best Practices When You Have Arthritis

Are your achy joints more than just a background concern these days? Are you changing your life because of stiff and painful joints?

You’re certainly not alone in this — one in five adults in the United States has some form of arthritis, with osteoarthritis (OA) leading the charge. OA alone affects about 33 million American adults.

Whatever has brought you to this page, the highly experienced team of joint experts at New Braunfels Orthopaedic Surgery & Sports Medicine wants you to know that there are solutions for living with arthritis. 

While arthritis is a catchall term for more than 100 different types of diseases, they all boil down to the same thing — joint pain and inflammation. And, in most cases, the following best practices apply.

1. Get the right arthritis team in your corner

There’s no heroism in gritting your teeth and just bearing the joint pain. A great first step is to get the right arthritis team in your corner so they can help you navigate the disease with far fewer problems and a lot more comfort.

As orthopedic experts, our focus is largely on degenerative and wear-and-tear forms of arthritis, such as OA. And we have an arsenal of tools that can help you move more comfortably, such as interventional injections like platelet-rich plasma. We can also monitor your arthritis for signs of changes and step in to slow or halt degradation.

2. Keep moving 

Your joints are meant to move, and they function best when they’re doing just that. We know that moving is more difficult with arthritis, but any movement at all increases circulation to your joints, which delivers invaluable resources for keeping them healthy.

3. Engage in targeted physical therapy

If you’re forgoing certain activities because of arthritis, physical therapy (PT) is a great way to get back to these activities or to find ways to work around them.

The goal of PT is to strengthen the muscles surrounding your joints to spread out the workload and take the pressure off of your damaged joints. PT can also help greatly with range of motion and flexibility.

4. Know when it’s time for replacement

While we offer nonsurgical treatment options for arthritis, we also specialize in joint replacement, including knee replacements and hip replacements. Each year in the US, there are nearly 800,000 knee replacements and nearly 550,000 hip replacements. 

We can perform a joint replacement at any time, but why wait while your world shrinks because of your inability to move around? More patients are opting for earlier replacement so they can continue to be active and enjoy their lives. 

Whether you want the ability to play with your grandkids or to hit the courts, exploring joint replacement when you’ve exhausted your conservative treatments, but before you’re completely sidelined, is a good practice.

To get yourself on a better path forward with a solid arthritis management plan in place, we invite you to contact our office in New Braunfels, Texas, for an assessment. You can call us at 830-341-1386 or request an appointment online today.