Joints & Bones

Your choices for treatment of back pain are surgery, steroid injections, pain medications, exercise strengthening and stretching programs, or techniques that place external force on the back such as deep massage, manipulation and passive stretching. Because surgery has such a high failure rate, it is usually recommended only when there is danger of permanent injury such as loss of feeling, loss of muscle control or intractable pain.

When all the cartilage in your knee is gone, the only effective treatment is to replace the whole knee. The ends of bones are soft, so they must be covered with a thick white gristle called cartilage. Once damaged, cartilage can never heal or re-grow. Small holes in cartilage can be repaired, but usually once cartilage is damaged the person spends the rest of his or her life losing cartilage until it is completely gone and the knee hurts 24 hours a day.

A diet loaded with cooked vegetables and olive oil helps reduce the pain, swelling and discomfort of rheumatoid arthritis, according to a study from Harvard School of Public Health.

If your back is stiff and hurts when you move, if it hurts to touch two points at the side of the top of...

People with arthritis should exercise to strengthen their muscles. This helps to stabilize their joints so they are not so loose that every movement chips off more cartilage. Exercises that put hard force on joints break cartilage, so the best exercise for people with arthritis is one that strengthens muscles without applying great force on joints. In T'ai Chi, a person moves very slowly for extended periods of time. Slow movements put great force on muscles to cause significant gain in strength without putting much force on joints.

Reports have shown that pills containing chondroitin sulfate and glucosamine, two components of cartilage, may help alleviate the pain of arthritis.

When you have arthritis, your joints hurt every time you move. When you wake up, your muscles and tendons are so stiff that you...

Even the most outrageous quacks sometimes end up as prophets when many years later, a scientific study supports theories that were previously scorned. An...

A study presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons showed that Synvisc injections are as effective as steroid (cortisone) injections in controlling the pain of damaged cartilage in the knee. Synvisc costs about $5000, compared to five dollars for cortisone.

The bones of your spine are separated by pads called discs. As you age, these discs dry out and become smaller. However, regular exercise compresses and relaxes these discs as you move up and down. This helps to keep the discs from shrinking and maintains your height.

Until recently, the only effective treatment has been to cut out the ends of the bones of the knee and replace the entire knee joint. Now for some people, a simpler procedure may be effective: partial knee replacement, called unicompartmental knee arthroplasty.