Osteoarthritis – Treatments

Transcript

For most patients with osteoarthritis, we’ll start with a conservative or non-operative treatment plan to treat your symptoms. Typically, this mainstay is anti-inflammatory medications. Medications, such as Aleve or ibuprofen or Motrin. They help to decrease the inflammation around the joint that’s actually causing the pain. Other medicines such as Tylenol can also be beneficial for your pain, but they’re not anti-inflammatory medicines. The caveat with the anti-inflammatory medications is, they tend to affect the kidney and also affect the stomach lining. So that patients who have a history of gastric ulcers may not be candidates for this type of treatment. Other treatments for osteoarthritis include activity modification, meaning stop doing the things that make your joint hurt when you’re doing them. Also, we consider things like physical therapy to improve the strength of the muscles around the joint to help offload the joint and decrease your pain. We also offer cane or a walker. This may assist with ambulation in patients, particularly who are elderly and may not be good candidates for surgery itself. We also make braces. In particular, for the knee, there’s a particular brace called an unloader knee brace, which helps to unload either the inside or the outside of the joint that’s causing the most pain.