Osteoarthritis 101 Part 2: Our Recommended Management

Osteoarthritis is a chronic, degenerative disease that can worsen over time. Without proper management, recurring joint pain and stiffness affects your daily efficiency and reduces your quality of life. While there’s no definite cure for this condition yet, Terrapin Care Center offers a wide range of services to prevent its progression and relieve your discomfort. Here are some of our pain relief methods:

Therapeutic Exercise

Apart from lifestyle and diet changes, physical therapy helps manage osteoarthritis. This involves manual traction and manipulation as well as massage therapy. We may also include a passive range of motion exercises and flexibility training like stretching and muscle lengthening in your treatment plan. These activities can help strengthen the muscles surrounding your affected joint

Osteoarthritis, particularly knee arthritis, affects your gait, balance and agility. It may also cause poor posture, unstable coordination and weak locomotion skills. We provide strength training, postural correction and body mechanics techniques to improve your musculoskeletal functions. Heat and cold treatments as well as aquatic exercises can also help relieve your discomfort.

Medical Pain Management

Since your knee joints bear most of your weight, the osteoarthritis progression in this area is often faster than other body parts. To support your muscles, we may recommend using customized knee braces. We will also administer anti-inflammatory substances into the supporting ligament and tendon to reduce their swelling, minimizing your pain.

Treating arthritis pain can also be accomplished by injecting hyaluronic acid. This helps increase lubrication in your joints, reducing their stiffness and improving your ease of movement. We offer nerve blocks as well, which interrupt pain signal transmission to help relieve your discomfort.

Our deep tissue laser therapy is reliable when it comes to reducing pain right at the source. It uses photobiostimulation to increase blood flow in the affected area, hastening your body’s natural healing processes. We also provide radiofrequency ablation services, which use electrical currents to block pain signals.

Thanks to advances in technology, different regenerative options are available to you. Stem cell injections take advantage of the stem cell’s natural ability to accommodate their neighboring tissue’s needs. Platelet rich plasma injections, on the other hand, involve introducing concentrated blood platelets into your joints, stimulating the production of healing and growth enzymes.

For more information about our osteoarthritis treatments, call us at (301) 220-1930, or complete our form. We serve College Park, Greenbelt and surrounding MD areas.