Therapeutic exercise = “medicine” for many chronic illnesses Therapeutic exercise is a key component in the conservative treatment of hip osteoarthritis. A paper published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports provides the up-to-date evidence-based basis for prescribing therapeutic exercise for hip osteoarthritis and more than twenty other chronic diseases. Exercise as medicine “ evidence for prescribing exercise as therapy in 26 different chronic diseases was written by B.K. Pederson and B. Saltin and published in September 2015. In the section focused on osteoarthritis, the authors observe Patients with osteoarthritis have a low physical activity level (Semanik et al., 2012), low muscle strength, and impaired muscle function (Roos et al., 2011; Segal and Glass, 2011) and go on...
Conservative Treatment for Hip OA With millions of Americans facing hip osteoarthritis (OA) at some point in our lives – 25% of us – it is increasingly important for our healthcare system to focus on treatments that are both cost-effective and provide the best possible patient outcomes. Historically, conservative treatment for hip OA in the US focuses more on painkillers, NSAIDs, and waiting for it to get bad enough to warrant surgery rather than on modern and more effective therapies. Medications do nothing to counter the increasing restrictions of the joint capsule, tightening of muscles around the hips and decreasing mobility and functionality that comes with hip osteoarthritis. If not addressed, these deficits result in decreased activity and exercise leading...
Focus on Treating Hip Pathology Tony Rocklin DPT is known as “the hip guy” in Portland and around the Pacific Northwest. He’s been a physical therapist for 18 years, and for the last ten years has focused on treating hip pathology. Tony went in that direction when he started noticing that there was a big void in how the hip joint was being treated. This was particularly true when compared to the much more advanced research being done on shoulders and knees. He was shocked to find that the general standard of care for hip pathology was painkillers, a cane, and waiting for it to get bad enough for surgery. That led Tony to independent research, reviewing and improving older...
Physical therapy to treat symptoms In this excerpt from his workshop at OPTA 2016, Dr. Tony Rocklin reviews therapeutic exercises for hip osteoarthritis that patients can perform at home to improve their mobility. Tony is a leading advocate for conservative treatment for patients with hip osteoarthritis that isn’t “drug-centric”. While the disease is degenerative and can’t be cured, the symptoms associated with it can be treated. These exercises are an important component of best practices for the conservative treatment of hip osteoarthritis. Those best practices minimize the use of medications and opioids and focus on physical therapy and therapeutic exercise to relieve the pain and improve mobility for patients. Unlike the use of drugs, which focus just on relieving pain, physical...
How Does Long Axis Traction Help? Long axis traction is one of the key manual therapies that physical therapists use to relieve the pain and improve mobility of patients with hip osteoarthritis. Long axis traction has been in use for more than 100 years, and multiple studies over the last twenty years have documented its efficacy. They also suggest that higher traction forces up to 800N are superior for improvements in pain and mobility. However, those higher traction forces can be difficult to maintain and exhausting for the therapist. They can be effectively delivered through HipTrac, which uses a pneumatic cylinder and hand pump that can easily and comfortably provide over 100 PSI to get above 800N of force when...
