4 Treatments for Knee Pain

Knee pain can occur for a variety of reasons, leaving the affected knee stiff, inflamed, swollen, and painful. Acute injuries that tear the joint's connective tissues can cause immediate knee pain. Arthritis, overuse injuries, obesity, and musculoskeletal imbalances can all contribute to chronic knee pain.

Fortunately, your painful knee problem may not require either invasive surgery or a lifetime of anti-inflammatory drugs. Modern chiropractic and regenerative treatment methods can help knee damage heal and make chronic knee problems easier to manage. Take a look at four such methods.

1. Stem Cell Injections

Stem cells serve as the blank canvases of the body. These cells have yet to become the differentiated cells found in specific tissues such as organs, brain, nerves, muscles, bones, or cartilage. When they come into such differentiated cells, chemical reactions transform the stem cells into those types of cells.

Stem cell injections can deliver concentrations of these cells into joints that need to rebuild tissues as efficiently as possible, including damaged or worn-out knee joints. Once injected, the stem cells provide rich sources for new cartilage, bone, or connective tissue, whichever the knee needs most to repair itself.

Stem cell therapy appears to offer long-lasting relief for knee problems. One study showed that arthritic knees continued to improve up to 24 months after injection. Another indicated that knees treated with stem cell injections showed improvement over their pretreatment state five years after treatment.

2. Platelet-Rich Plasma Injections

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections can dramatically boost tissue healing, including the tissues of damaged or degenerated knees. Blood plasma normally contains tiny cells known as platelets. These platelets do not only enable clotting, but they also contain growth factors that stimulate tissue repair.

Unfortunately, some areas of the body have a poorer blood supply than others, while others may need more platelets than usual if they've sustained significant damage. in the knee, this damage can include ruptured ligaments, torn muscles, and cartilage deterioration that creates painful bone-on-bone friction.

PRP treatments work by taking a sample of your blood and spinning it in a centrifuge until the doctor can easily separate the platelets from the other blood elements. The doctor then injects the collected platelet-rich serum directly into the knee. A series of these injections can accelerate your natural healing processes.

3. Laser Therapy

Today's medical practitioners use lasers for more than just surgery. While surgical lasers make an excellent substitute for scalpels, therapeutic lasers don't cut tissue at all. Instead, they operate at a lower frequency that allows them to pass right through the skin and deliver their healing benefits to the tissues beneath.

Laser therapy (often referred to as cold laser therapy due to the relatively low power used) can boost blood flow to the knee, reducing inflammation and swelling while also helping injured tissue regenerate. It can relieve or minimize both acute and chronic knee pain.

4. Chiropractic Care

Chiropractic care can ease knee pain by addressing underlying musculoskeletal issues that throw your body off balance. This abnormal stance, gait, or posture may strain your knees and other weight-bearing joints, causing premature damage, inviting injuries, and referring nerve pain from the spine to other areas.

Your chiropractor can correct a spinal imbalance by making small but significant adjustments to the vertebral joints, allowing your body to assume a straighter, healthier posture. Chiropractors can also adjust the knee joint itself, allowing joint components to move more freely and with less pain.

A chiropractic treatment plan may also include lifestyle recommendations to help you keep your knees comfortable and functional. For example, your chiropractor may advise you on a regular exercise routine to keep the knees strong and limber or weight control strategies to take unwanted stress off of the knees.

Regenerative Medicine of Southern Indiana can offer any or all of the natural pain management modalities described above. Contact our clinic to learn more about these procedures and schedule an evaluation of your knee trouble.