Common Questions About Knee Pain

What is pain from? What is arthritic pains? Well, it can be different varying per patient time of day, location. So it can be constant or it can be intermittent. It can occur with movement or it can occur after movement. It can present as aching, pain, stabbing pain, uh, soreness stiffness. It can be located in one part of the knee, the inside of the knee. It could be located on the outside of the knee or globally throughout the whole knee. So a lot of questions that we get in the office are very, very common. And just to go over a couple of those is, can, can joint pain in my knee cause pain in another part of my body. For example, my back or my hip. Well, an arthritic knee doesn’t cause an arthritic back or an arthritic knee doesn’t cause an arthritic hip. What happens is when you have a painful knee and you limp, your gait is abnormal. Thus putting various different muscles under tension stresses that they’re not used to be under. And then patients have exacerbations of back pain or hip pain is very common.

So another question that we commonly encounter is, why does the knee pain wake me up at night? I’m not walking on it. So why does it hurt me at night? Well, during the day everyone is sidetracked by doing various activities, working, etc. You know daily living type things. And then at night the knee is the most sore because you’ve been on it all day and you’re trying to fall asleep. And it’s kind of like a vicious cycle keeping you awake and having trouble falling asleep. So it’s very common. Oftentimes we recommend medication before bed, such as an anti-inflammatory to kind of reduce those symptoms. Um, and then just a statement, I can tell when the weather changes. So this, this is very common. People that have had surgery, need surgery, I can tell that we’re having a storm coming in or I know a day in advance that there’s going to be a change in the temperature. So what happens is when there’s an atmospheric barometric trying to change, the joint can sense that because there’s fluid shifts in the body, fluid shifts from in the knee, outside the knee. There are receptors in the body that can sense these pressure changes in general. Also, joints can feel just kind of stiff when it gets a little bit cooler. So it’s a very, very common thing.