Healing from a Shoulder Fracture: What to Expect
Depending on the severity of your injury, it can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to fully rehabilitate a shoulder fracture. Here’s what to expect.
Knee Pain: Expert-Recommended Treatments
Your knee is one of the most important load-bearing joints in your body, and one of the most likely to cause pain associated with injury or wear-and-tear over time. Knee pain can hinder your ability to get around, making it difficult to get through your everyday tasks.
Dr. Philip Regala provides orthopedic care to patients in and around Naples, Florida. That includes diagnosing the cause of your knee pain and recommending appropriate treatment for common knee conditions like arthritis.
Causes of knee pain
The most common causes of knee pain are two-fold — many tiny injuries caused by repetitive motion, and arthritis. As your joints age, every injury, no matter how small, has a cumulative effect. Simply working in a profession that requires a lot of stooping, standing, and climbing stairs, or playing a sport that requires frequent sudden changes in direction at speed, can cause damage.
The naturally occurring fluid inside your knees also lessens as your joints age, and cartilage can wear away while bone spurs develop and nerves get compressed, forming an arthritic joint. A complete knee replacement can often resolve these issues, but it’s typically not the first choice of treatment, especially if you’re relatively young!
Expert-recommended knee treatment
Fortunately, there are plenty of treatments that can help resolve knee pain short of installing a completely new joint. Dr. Regala specializes in regenerative medicine, finding ways to help your knee joints heal and strengthen themselves with the aid of minimally invasive treatments.
Platelet-rich plasma
Platelet-rich plasma, or PRP, is created by centrifuging a vial of your own blood to separate the platelets into a small portion of plasma. Dr. Regala can inject the PRP into your knee joint to reduce pain, or apply it during arthroscopic surgery to help speed healing. The platelets contain growth factors that help kickstart the regenerative process.
Arthroscopic surgery
If you have arthritis or synovitis (joint inflammation), Dr. Regala can perform arthroscopic surgery to help “clean out” your joint and repair small injuries. This type of surgery uses tiny incisions and tools guided by a miniature camera. Arthroscopy is ideal for joint repair, since it allows work to be done quickly through a small access incision without opening the entire joint capsule. As a result, the recovery from arthroscopic surgery is usually swift.
Dr. Regala can also provide corticosteroid injections to reduce inflammation in your knee, physical therapy to help increase flexibility and mobility, and viscosupplementation to help replenish fluids inside the joint.
Ready to return to a life before knee pain? Contact our office at 239-325-1131 or book an appointment online. We can help.
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