5 Ways to Ease Your Joint Pain Without Surgery

Life has slowed down a little, or maybe a lot, because of joint pain, and you want to figure out how to get back to pain-free movement, without further compounding the issue through surgery.

You and the more than 92 million other Americans struggling with joint pain and inflammation are in the same boat. And we have some good news for you: There are many ways in which we can relieve joint pain that don’t come at the edge of a knife.

At Revive Spine and Pain Center, our team takes pride in offering a wide range of nonsurgical treatments to relieve the pain in your joints so you can get back to the business of living life to the fullest.

Here, we take a look at five nonsurgical joint pain treatments that are in constant rotation at our practice as we help our patients to move freely again.

Interventional injections

Our frontline treatments for joint pain often involve interventional injections. For example, a corticosteroid injection includes a local anesthetic for near immediate pain relief, as well as a steroid that tackles the inflammation.

We also offer trigger point injections in which we locate knots in your muscles that may be pulling on your joints, and then we release them.

Of all the joints in the body, the knees are the ones that account for most of the arthritis burden — 528 million people around the world have osteoarthritis (OA) and 365 million of these people have OA in their knees. 

If you’re hobbled by knee OA, we offer viscosupplementation, a procedure in which we relubricate these joints with hyaluronic acid.

Regenerative medicine

As we just reviewed, the most common type of arthritis is OA, and this is a degenerative form of the disease in which the cartilage inside your joint breaks down. The problem is that cartilage doesn't have the resources to repair and rebuild itself, which is why we offer regenerative medicine.

Whether we use stem cells that we harvest from your bone marrow or platelets that we collect from your blood, we redirect these powerful regenerative resources into the damaged soft tissues in your joints to promote rebuilding and repair.

Physical therapy

Your joints rely on support from surrounding muscles, so it’s very important to make sure these muscles are strong. Through physical therapy, we target the muscles surrounding your painful joint and increase their strength to take the pressure off of your joint.

Physical therapy also focuses on maintaining flexibility and range of motion in your joints through stretching exercises.

Acupuncture

Another approach for relieving joint pain is through medical acupuncture, a practice that’s thousands of years old. The goal of acupuncture is to restore the flow of resources in your body by removing blockages.

Using hair-thin needles that we insert along specific meridians and acupressure points, we reset the energy in your body to reduce inflammation and relieve pain. 

One study found that after 26 weeks of acupuncture, patients experienced a significant reduction in pain and an improvement in function over those who did not have acupuncture.

Lose weight

Lastly, a great way to relieve joint pain is to shed any excess pounds you might be carrying. Your body is designed for a certain amount of weight, and when you exceed that, the burden falls to your joints. 

Being overweight or obese is one of the biggest risk factors for arthritis, so it’s a good idea to eliminate this risk.

In most cases, we recommend a combination of these nonsurgical strategies for relieving joint pain. We’re happy to sit down with you to figure out which combination works best for your goals and lifestyle.

To get started, we invite you to make an appointment at one of our New Jersey locations in Marlton, Hamilton Township, Northfield, or East Brunswick.