These days, it’s no longer a matter of wondering whether your knees will give you trouble, but how much. You might even say that you’re starting to view your arthritic knees as more of a liability than an asset.
Each year in the United States, doctors perform nearly 800,000 knee replacement surgeries with the goal of restoring pain-free movement. What you have in common with all of these people is that they were in the same boat as you and wondering whether to take the knee replacement leap.
To help guide you in your decision-making, the highly experienced team of board-certified orthopedic surgeons at New Braunfels Orthopaedic Surgery & Sports Medicine put together a checklist that we often use to determine whether knee replacement is the best option.
Let’s face it: The reason you’re reading this is because you’re tired of dealing with ongoing knee pain. At first, you could manage the pain with anti-inflammatory medications, stretching, and cold-hot therapies, but these techniques are falling short these days.
Perhaps you’ve taken more aggressive steps with corticosteroid injections, viscosupplementation, and regenerative therapies. They may have worked at first, but the degeneration inside the joint has advanced too far and the pain is breaking through.
If less aggressive treatments aren’t doing the trick in managing your knee osteoarthritis anymore, it’s likely time to look at knee replacement surgery.
When you have knee osteoarthritis, it means the cartilage inside your joint is wearing down and breaking apart. Under normal circumstances, your cartilage, which is a slippery substance that covers the bony surfaces inside the joint, prevents friction and promotes smooth gliding.
As this cartilage breaks down, your bones can rub together unprotected, which is what leads to the joint pain and inflammation. Making matters more painful, when your bones rub together, pieces can break off and join the loose cartilage inside the joint to create more discomfort.
If our team finds through advanced imaging that there’s little cartilage left inside your knee, it makes a good case for knee replacement.
An active lifestyle is a healthy one, and you enjoy getting out and moving around. Whether it’s time spent on the pickleball court, walking with friends, or whatever else you might enjoy, these activities support your physical and mental health.
If you’ve been missing out because of achy knees, replacing the joint can get you back to your active and social lifestyle.
Knee osteoarthritis affects 365 million people around the world, and what each of these people faces is the fact that the disease is progressive and irreversible.
The goal with knee replacement is to reverse back out of knee osteoarthritis by providing you with replacement joint parts that glide together smoothly, without pain and inflammation.
Of course, knee replacement surgery is a decision only you can make — our role is to make sure that you have all of the information you need to make a decision that feels right for you.
A great place to start is to sit down with one of our knee replacement experts to review your medical history, your symptoms, the current state of your knee(s), and your goals. Contact New Braunfels Orthopaedic Surgery & Sports Medicine in New Braunfels, Texas, today using our online form or by calling 830-341-1386.
