Arthritis News: Pain vs. Imaging Reality
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Speaker: [00:00:00] You have arthritis too. Join the club.
For our older patients, we should expect to see some wear and tear on your joints. Just like we should not expect to see any arthritis on a say 10-year-old girl's, x-ray of her neck.
As we age, we are going to have more grinding on these bones. We've put them through much more over an extended period of time. What those x-rays don't tell you are your, whatever they find doesn't mean that you should have pain.
There's this [00:01:00] patient that I'm treating right now who did not know that the arthritis was moderate to severe in her neck. This was a sort of incidental finding. Still, she finds out that she, that she has the arthritis in her neck, and now she says, wait, does this mean I'm going to be in pain? And I say, no, you weren't in pain there before.
You're not going to have pain there now because the x-ray found it, your pain, and this is the case. For her, it was. It was to the side of her neck. She's pointing at muscle.
This muscle pulls at her bones and that's why she's complaining of neck pain. When she loosens this muscle, the neck pain is gone.[00:02:00]
Imaging can be extremely helpful when it comes to very specific diagnoses that I won't go into right now, but for majority of people, those x-rays aren't going to do very much for you. The reason why physical therapy is the first line for treating pain, musculoskeletal pain is because it's so conservative and it doesn't require much.
You can get evaluated. And we can find out if this is more of a muscle or a ligament or a tendon sort of thing, because those, those soft tissues are attached to the bone.[00:03:00]
This is important because physical therapists don't have x-ray machines in their practice. Majority, they, they're not having x-rays. And that is because it's not that important.
So yes, you may have signs of osteoarthritis according to your x-ray. It does not mean. That you are going to suffer from pain
folks, my takeaway for this message is, or for this show, is just because they have it doesn't mean [00:04:00] you have to suffer from pain. if you are having trouble understanding this or understanding how to navigate life after receiving terrible news from your x-ray, reach out to me at kinesmovement.com.
Book a consult. But until then, take ownership of your movement. Do more, wait less of seeing you on the next one.
