Pain when walking your dog. Difficulty bending your knee to sit down at the dinner table. Trouble gardening for more than a few minutes. These are just a few of the ways that knee osteoarthritis can affect your daily life.
Unfortunately, many people have to deal with this type of arthritis and the issues it causes. It’s reported that 10% of men and 13% of women in the U.S. who are over 60 have knee osteoarthritis. You may have heard or read before that physical therapy can help people with knee arthritis. But you might still be wondering if this type of treatment is really worth it. The short answer is that it can be for many people.
What benefits can physical therapy for knee arthritis offer?
It’s true that every patient responds to physical therapy differently; there’s no absolute guarantee that knee arthritis physical therapy will be worth it for you. However, to paraphrase a line from The Hunger Games, the odds are in your favor.
Your physical therapist can evaluate your arthritic knee. They can also determine what issues are increasing your symptoms. They can then build you a physical therapy plan that can offer benefits like:
- Improving knee function — Regaining lost knee function is a benefit that therapeutic care can offer arthritis patients. One category of physical therapy that can help improve your knee function is manual therapy. This therapy category includes techniques where therapists mobilize and manipulate joints and soft tissue. A study of manual therapy shows that it helped improve function scores in knee osteoarthritis patients by 52% in just four weeks.
- Reducing pain — Many patients would consider physical therapy worth it if it helped decrease their joint pain. Your physical therapist can offer this benefit using a manual therapy technique called joint mobilization. This involves your physical therapist using their hands to move your joint through its normal range of motion. One study on knee osteoarthritis reveals that patients who had joint mobilization had a nearly 18-point decrease in their pain scores immediately following their session.
- Increasing range of motion (ROM) — As mentioned above, many knee arthritis sufferers can’t bend their knee as far. In medical terms, their knee ROM has decreased. Joint mobilization can also help improve ROM in knee arthritis patients. A study of this technique found that it led to a more than 15-degree increase in knee flexion in knee arthritis patients immediately after it was applied.
Panther Physical Therapy offers knee arthritis treatment that’s well worth it
Not sure where you can find knee arthritis physical therapy that offers the benefits above? You’ll find the care you’re looking for at Panther Physical Therapy.
Our therapy specialists have the experience to evaluate your knee effectively. They excel at building personalized physical therapy plans designed to reduce joint pain and increase mobility. We can even help you get arthritis care from home thanks to our virtual therapy and at-home care services.
Contact our team today for more information about our treatment services for knee arthritis or to schedule your initial appointment.