Understanding Your Hip Pain Treatment Options
Perhaps you’re one of the millions of people seeking effective and long-lasting hip pain treatment options. Knowing what helps hip pain can be tricky, because your hip pain can be caused by a variety of factors.
Hip pain tends to be a problem that affects us more as we get older, and knowing how to treat hip pain as we enter our golden years can make a significant impact on our day-to-day mood and the activities we can take part in.
Learning how to treat hip pain is a complicated process, and you probably have a lot of questions: Do I need surgery to solve my hip pain? Does collagen help hip pain? Is my hip pain even treatable?
Today, we want to explore the variety of hip pain treatment options available.
By presenting some of the most popular hip pain treatment options in a clear and easy-to-understand way, we hope that you’ll be in a great starting position for a conversation with your doctor. Before we do this, however, it’s worth revising the causes of hip joint pain.
What causes hip pain?
The location of hip pain is often a main factor in diagnosing your health issue. The most common cause of hip pain is osteoarthritis. It is a condition that affects the cartilage in your hip joint.
Cartilage is a collagen-rich tissue that stops our bones from grinding against each other. Imagine how any machine needs lubrication; cartilage allows bones in a joint to glide past one another without damaging each other.
Cartilage cells, like any other cells in our body, break down naturally through use and they are replaced by new cells. Having arthritis means that the body isn’t rejuvenating and replacing the cartilage in your hip joint to keep up with the general wear and tear that it is subjected to.
Cartilage tissue is strong, and for very good reason. Cartilage is built to help protect from impact. Acting like shock absorbers in our important joints like the hip or knee, they are specialized to withstand strong impacts.
Other types of proteins-based tissue would become injured if they tried to do the job cartilage does. To make your cartilage so strong and flexible, your body uses collagen protein.
There are also two important things to note. Cartilage doesn’t have a traditional nervous system, and it doesn’t have a traditional connection to our circulatory system. This is why cartilage is slow to heal. It doesn’t receive the same amount of nutrients through your blood vessels that other tissues do.
This can be a particularly distressing fact for patients with arthritis, who are losing cartilage faster than they can rejuvenate it.
Of course, not all hip pain is caused by arthritis.
Other causes of hip pain
Hip pain can be caused by many conditions, such as torn ligaments, strained muscles, and bursitis. Your doctor will be able to tell you if you have a structural issue with your hip, and point you down the best path for healing.
So that brings us to treatment. What are the best hip pain treatment options? Let’s take a look.
Hip pain treatment options
Hip pain treatment is constantly evolving. In only a short time, researchers and medical health professionals have developed better and better hip pain treatment options.
In fact, if you’ve been suffering with hip pain for several years now, it’s worth booking a new consultation with your doctor to see if scientific research now has answers for you that it didn’t before!
Right now, doctors are better equipped than ever to help with hip pain. Let’s take a look into some of the most popular and effective hip treatment options available right now:
Hip surgery
Hip replacement surgeries help thousands of patients around the world every year to access better mobility. As is the case in most fields of medicine, surgery comes with inherent risks and is only considered as an option when less invasive techniques haven’t succeeded.
Surgery can be a scary thought. Not only is it a serious procedure from a health perspective but it can incur a large financial burden. Some patients don’t want to start conversations with their doctors about hip pain treatments as they believe that surgery is an inevitability, but that isn’t always the case.
Although surgery can be a vital tool for how to treat hip pain, it’s perhaps best to start with some alternatives of how to relieve hip and knee pain without surgery. And there are many! You can discuss your condition with your doctor and see if nonsurgical hip pain treatment is right for you.
Collagen supplements
The best nonsurgical hip pain treatment options focus on the regeneration of cartilage, and to do this we usually look to our diet and supplements for hip pain.
Considering that collagen protein is the go-to protein in cartilage, collagen supplements are often provided as a hip pain treatment option.
Does collagen help hip pain? Absolutely! Collagen does help hip pain because it gives your body the building blocks it needs to create healthy cartilage, tendons, ligaments, and muscles.
In fact, collagen is one of the few things that can help you regrow your cartilage, and more cartilage = less joint pain for many people. This is why collagen is a popular hip arthritis pain relief supplement.
Supplementation allows an extra degree of control over their collagen protein intake. Used in addition to a healthy and balanced diet, it provides peace of mind that the body is stocked up with what it needs to heal itself effectively.
In other words, taking collagen supplements as a hip pain treatment aims to help the body heal itself naturally, using the exact resources it needs to do that. It’s perhaps the most direct hip pain treatment option available.
Pain medication
Pain medication offers a short-term hip pain treatment, but it’s important to note from the outset that, unlike collagen, pain medication is treating the symptoms of hip pain, rather than the actual underlying problem.
Many of the causes of hip pain can create unwanted swelling in areas of the hip, and pain medications like NSAIDs (non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs) reduce pain by reducing inflammation.
Keeping pain medication on hand may be a good hip pain treatment option to provide you temporary relief from hip pain while your more long-term and lasting hip pain treatment takes place.
Physical therapy
Physical therapy is incredibly beneficial to add to your hip pain treatment plan. It focuses on gentle movements to build strength and stability in your joints.
If your hip pain is caused by an imbalance or a previous injury or surgery, physical therapy can be instrumental in relieving hip pain. Your physical therapist may also be able to use special machines to reduce inflammation and pain in your joint.
Physical therapy won’t get rid of hip pain straight away, but it’s one of the best long-term hip pain treatment options, and can sometimes prevent the need for hip surgery.
Assistance devices
Lifestyle adaptations can have a great impact on your quality of life. Assistance devices such as a cane can take some pressure off your hip – a joint that often supports a large percentage of your total body weight when moving.
Choosing a cane or walking device is something many patients need help with, as length and strength are important to adapt to your height and weight. Your doctor can help you decide and walking support should be part of your hip pain treatment plan.
Diet and exercise
Nutrition can play a major role in your overall health. And yes, even the health of your joints.
If you are overweight, this can cause extra stress on your hip joint, as your joint has to carry extra weight and impact during activities like jogging or jumping.
Your doctor can help you decide if your weight is a factor in your hip pain. If you get on a weight loss plan, every excess pound lost is one pound less pressure on your hip joint, which may provide pain relief.
A healthy, balanced diet, and regular exercise are great keys to overall health. Although we’re focused on hip pain, no one part of the body is ever really isolated.
You could be having hip pain because of issues with your other joints, or even a problem with your immune system! It’s important to work with your doctor to find healthy routines that support your body’s optimal function.
Choosing your hip pain treatment
What helps hip pain will differ from person to person. The good news is that your treatment options are not mutually exclusive. That means you can take advantage of more than one treatment option, under the advice of your doctor, for a multifaceted treatment plan.
Pain medication can provide immediate relief caused by sudden pain flares, while in the long term, a healthy diet and lifestyle can help take pressure off your hips.
Meanwhile, by taking a collagen protein supplement, you’ll be providing your body with the resources it needs to build and restore cartilage, as well as the tendons and ligaments that support the hip.
How to select the right collagen protein
Providing your hip with ample cartilage and strong connective tissues is often what helps hip pain most in the long run. That’s why starting a daily collagen supplement is a good idea if you are living with joint pain.
But before rushing into buying the first collagen supplement you see, there are some important need-to-knows about collagen protein.
We don’t want collagen supplements to simply pass through the digestive system without being absorbed into the bloodstream. But that’s exactly what collagen in its whole form will do. That's why companies use hydrolysis to reduce the size of collagen molecules.
Hydrolyzed collagen is easier to digest and absorb. You can even look for nano-hydrolyzed collagen which has gone through the process of hydrolysis more than once to become extra bioavailable.
Nano-hydrolyzed collagen supplements are the best collagen for joints because they are so much more effective.
Of course, you should also read the label of your collagen supplement carefully. Supplements, in general, are not FDA regulated, so companies can put all sorts of additives into their products.
Look for products with lots of positive reviews and not excess sugars or additives. This can help ensure you are getting an effective and healthy supplement.
Taking a hydrolyzed collagen protein alongside NSAIDs and a targeted physical therapy program can help you achieve the relief from hip pain that you need.
