Is Knee Surgery an Only Option?

Scared of undergoing a total knee replacement Surgery? Does undergoing a total knee replacement surgery make you feel like total damage to the knee joint ? Well! A knee replacement surgery is only an option if your knee gives you unbearable or uncontrollable pain, instability, or loss of function that affects your daily life and makes it difficult for you to perform your normal activities.

Recent advances in medicine are focused on Joint preservation rather than joint replacement options. Your orthopedic surgeon and healthcare team will always evaluate various pros and cons and other measures before suggesting a total knee replacement surgery. Some of these alternative treatment measures include:

• Physical therapy: A physiotherapist professional can help with your knee pain with a personalized plan that helps reduce pain and strengthen the key muscles that affect your knees.
• Hyaluronic acid injections: Injections of hyaluronic acid in the knee joint keeps the joint lubricated and improve knee mobility and reduce knee pain and friction.
• Medications and Steroids: Pain relief medications like NSAIDs, opioids and corticosteroid injections can help relieve knee pain.
• Prolotherapy: This therapy aims to improve blood supply to the joints or in the area near pain. During the procedure, the doctor injects an irritant solution like dextrose that stimulates the healing process by promoting blood supply to the area.
• Arthroscopic surgery: In this surgery, your surgeon with the help of an arthroscopy, removes bone fragments, small pieces of a torn meniscus, broken fragments and cartilage and can repair broken ligaments with the help of it.
• Stem cell treatment: in this treatment, stem cells from the bone marrow located in the hip are extracted and injected into the knee tissue to help regenerate cartilage tissue in the knee.
• PRP treatment: Plasma-rich protein treatment involves injecting PRP growth proteins into the osteoarthritic knee. However, due to lack of standardization techniques this therapy is not recommended.

As a last resort, recommending or undergoing an orthopedic surgeon is always an option in case all the parts of your knee are damaged. Also, it remains as a backup plan in any case where partial knee Replacement has been done in the past but does not provided desired results.

Read More: Factors that May Cause you Knee Pain