Joint Injections and Physical Therapy: Your Complete Rehabilitation Plan for Chronic Knee Pain

You remember a time when you could run up stairs with ease and spring out of a chair without blinking an eye. Today, these same activities come with a fair amount of grunting and groaning as you labor to work with achy, painful knees. You're not alone.

To call achy knees common is an understatement — osteoarthritis (OA) on its own affects nearly 530 million people worldwide, and the knees account for more than 80% of the disease’s total burden.

If you’re feeling hobbled and hopeless when it comes to your knees, the team here at 

Valiant Life Medical wants you to explore a combination approach that garners great success — joint injections followed by physical therapy.

Let’s explore how this incredibly effective one-two punch can get you back on your feet and moving more freely.

Getting to the other side of your knee pain

One of the biggest hurdles when it comes to achy knees is that the road to healthier joints can seem impossible when you can’t move without pain. When you have a degenerative condition like OA that’s causing pain and inflammation in your knees, one of the best ways to push back is through movement. But the pain is preventing you from moving as you should.

This is where our joint injections come in. These injections contain a local anesthetic that immediately addresses your pain, as well as a steroid that provides longer-term relief from the inflammation.

Our goal in administering these corticosteroid injections is to provide you with a period of relief so you can pursue more sustainable solutions for your achy knees, namely physical therapy (PT).

Strengthening your knees for the future

Your knees are the largest joints in your body, and they contain a number of different components, including:

• Three bones (femur, tibia, and patella)
• Ligaments
• Muscles
• Tendons
• Meniscuses
• Cartilage

When you have achy knees, it means that one or more of these components is failing  — in the case of OA, it’s your cartilage. When one area is damaged like this, it throws off the balance in the joint and leads to cascading problems.

Through physical therapy, our mission is to strengthen and rebalance your joints. One of the best ways to do this is through strengthening exercises that target the large muscle groups that support your knees, such as your quads, hamstrings, and calf muscles. By keeping these muscles strong, we take the pressure off of the other, more fragile, components in your knee.

In addition to enlisting more muscles to support your knees, our physical therapists also concentrate on range of motion and flexibility in these joints, which helps keep the connective tissues healthy and strong. 

Best of all, we tailor your PT to your specific needs and goals. If getting up and down stairs and in and out of chairs is the goal, we’ve got you. If your goal is a little more lofty, such as getting back to the tennis or pickleball courts, we work toward these objectives.

Between joint injections and physical therapy, our team has helped scores of patients get back to their lives without being held prisoner by painful knees.

If you’d like to see whether the joint injections and physical therapy combination approach is right for you, please contact our office in Fort Worth, Texas, to set up a consultation.