Your knees are not only the largest joints in your body; they might just be the hardest working. From the moment you jump out of bed in the morning until you lie back down at night, your knees provide support, mobility, and range of motion.
Now, you’re no longer jumping out of bed, or jumping at all, thanks to knee pain and stiffness that have put considerable limitations on your life.
The good news is that Dr. Rajiv Sood offers several minimally invasive solutions for knee pain here at Spine & Orthopedic Center. Read on to explore which joint injection might work best for putting that spring back in your step.
You can develop ongoing knee pain in many different ways, but knee osteoarthritis (OA) very much leads the charge. OA affects about 32.5 million adults in the United States, and the knee joints account for a large percentage of this OA.
Outside of knee OA, other issues can lead to chronic knee pain, including:
Rest assured. We first work to identify your knee pain to come up with the right treatment plan. The odds are good, however, that a joint injection can play a role in helping to combat whatever ails your knees.
In the following, we will look at a few different injection therapies that can help combat knee pain and inflammation.
A frontline treatment for joint pain and inflammation is corticosteroid injections. With these, we deliver a local anesthetic to tackle the pain and a corticosteroid to reduce the inflammation. Corticosteroid injections can provide relief for days, weeks, or months and provide a great window during which you can take steps to strengthen your knees through physical therapy.
If the bones in your knee joints are rubbing together because of a breakdown in cartilage — OA — Hyalgan may be beneficial. The primary ingredient in Hyalgan is hyaluronate, similar to cartilage in that it provides lubrication and cushioning within your joint.
To get your knees to rebuild tissues, we can try a decades-old technique called prolotherapy. This is an interesting concept in which we inject an irritant (usually dextrose) into damaged tissues in your knee joints to force your body to respond and send in healing resources. The goal is to promote long-term health in your knees by encouraging them to rebuild and repair.
Another way in which we encourage healing is through PRP injections, which is a regenerative therapy. After harvesting and isolating platelets from your blood, we inject the concentrate into your knees, where they release growth factors that create an ideal healing environment.
PRP is a great approach for any soft tissue damage in your knees, from OA to ligament tears.
To figure out which joint injection will get you back on your feet without pain, we invite you to contact our Jonesboro, Georgia, office to schedule an appointment.