4 Benefits of Injections for Chronic Hip Pain

You now dread stairs and getting in and out of your favorite chair, never mind the car, has become quite challenging thanks to a painful hip (or hips).

If you’re struggling with chronic hip pain, you're not alone. The issue affects about 10% of the general population in the United States, with numbers skewing toward older demographics.

Here at Revive Spine and Pain Center, one of our team’s biggest priorities is to help patients move more freely when they’re struggling with chronic spine or joint pain. We understand how chronic pain can limit your life, and our goal is to open it back up again through pain management.

Here, we look at the simplest approach for chronic hip pain — joint injections — and their many benefits.

What’s driving most hip pain

There are many roads to chronic hip pain and we’re going to focus on hip osteoarthritis (OA), which is the most common. OA affects 33 million Americans, and counting, and the hips are some of the most commonly affected joints, right behind the knees.

With hip OA, the protective cartilage that covers the head of the femur (thigh bone) breaks down, which allows the bones in this large ball-and-socket joint to rub together. This friction leads to the joint pain and inflammation that are associated with hip OA. 

There’s no cure for OA, which makes management the best solution. And one of the frontline management tools when it comes to OA in any joint are corticosteroid injections that contain a pain reliever and a steroid for inflammation.

Benefits of hip injections

Now let’s dive into some of the many benefits of corticosteroid injections for chronic hip pain, which include:

Pain relief that gives you freedom to move again

The pain is one thing and can cast a long shadow over your life, but your loss of freedom in being able to move around freely is equally as disruptive to your quality of life. With one injection, we can quickly relieve the pain and inflammation inside  your hip joint so that you can get back to your life.

Injections can also be used to diagnose your hip pain

While we typically use digital imaging and symptom reviews to diagnose the source of your hip pain, if these prove inconclusive, we can turn to a hip joint injection to help guide us. If, after we administer the injection, you don’t experience relief after about 10 days, this can point away from hip OA and toward an issue that we need to investigate further.

Avoid hip replacement surgery

Each year in the United States, about 544,000 hip replacements are performed, mostly due to advanced hip arthritis. If you want to delay surgery, joint injections can certainly help, so long as you use this time wisely, which we get into next.

Time to take more steps to improve the health of your hip

After we administer your hip joint injections and you experience a period of relief, we want you to use this time well. 

Getting going on a physical therapy regimen that strengthens your hips is a great way to garner more meaningful results that will help you avoid surgery down the road. As well, using this time to exercise can also benefit the long-term health of your hips.

So, it’s a good idea not to think of these injections as one and done — instead think of them as jumping off points to take steps to improve your joint health.

As you can see, hip joint injections are good frontline tools that can provide you with relief, freedom of movement, and the chance to change the course of your joint health.

To figure out whether hip injections are right for you, we invite you to contact us at one of our New Jersey locations in Marlton, Hamilton Township, Northfield, or East Brunswick to schedule an appointment.