How Effective is Viscosupplementation in Remedying Knee Pain?

Your knees are your largest joints and arguably the hardest-working, given all that they do to enable support, mobility, and range of motion. So when your knees are in pain, it can limit your life in significant ways, leaving you to search for solutions. One such solution may lie in viscosupplementation.

At Summit Pain Alliance, our team of experienced pain management specialists routinely handles musculoskeletal problems of all kinds, from aching joints to chronic back pain. And when it comes to your knees, we offer a wide range of solutions, including viscosupplementation.

Here’s a look at how viscosupplementation can effectively remedy your knee pain and re-establish your mobility.

The root of your knee pain

Given all that your knees are responsible for, it’s little wonder that problems can arise, leaving you to cope with discomfort and pain. Leading the charge is osteoarthritis, which affects more than 30 million people in the United States. And this number is expected to rise given the aging population.

Osteoarthritis is a wear-and-tear disease that affects the cartilage inside your joints, causing it to break down, leaving your unprotected bones to rub together. This leads to pain and inflammation. When this happens in the knees, it can cause serious problems with mobility, which is why there were nearly one million total knee replacements in 2017 alone.

While joint replacement is certainly an option in more advanced cases, there are less aggressive steps we can take to offset the effects of your arthritis before taking this leap.

It is important to note that there’s no cure for osteoarthritis, yet, but there is much we can do to ease the pain and discomfort, as well as slow the progression of the disease.

Viscosupplementation for your knees

Viscosupplementation is a technique in which we inject hyaluronate into your knees. Hyaluronate is a thick fluid that boosts the lubrication inside your joints, which can reduce your pain and improve your mobility.

Most of our patients who experience osteoarthritis in the knee benefit from a series of viscosupplementation treatments — usually between three and five injections — which we space apart by a week to allow the fluid to spread around evenly.

While some patients report increasing relief throughout their treatments, most patients report optimal results about 8-12 weeks after the initial treatment.

As for how long your results will last, that’s a tough question to answer as it varies from one patient to the next. Some report results that last six months or more. You can boost your results by using the reprieve from your knee pain to strengthen the joint through targeted physical therapy.

If you’re struggling with aching knees at the hands of osteoarthritis, please contact one of our two locations in Petaluma or Santa Rosa, California, to learn more about how viscosupplementation can help.