Whats causing my hip pain
Hey, everybody. I'm Dr. James Fedich. I'm the clinic director here at Village Family Clinic in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Talk to you today about hip pain. So I had a couple issues with hips this week, and I just want to go over a couple quick things with the hip. The first thing I ask people when they say they have hip pain is I kind of make them point at it. Because people say hip pain, they mean a lot of different things. So we got a little friendly skeleton over here. We're kind of looking at them from the rear. And a lot of people say the hip pain, they'll kind of point to this area here. And that's kind of where your sciatic nerve is in here. And that's more of a pelvis and spine issue here. And then some people call this the hip, which is part of the hip. That's the iliac crest there. That's a different part. But most doctors talk about hips. We're really talking about down here. And there's, we call this the hip joint. It's called the ball and socket joint. You can see your femur here and the long bone in your leg has a ball at the end that goes in this hip socket. And that allows us to move the hip around in a lot of different ways. So a lot of things can happen in the hip. When you people say they get a hip replacement, a lot of times what they'll mean is we have to, kind of cut some of this ball off and we'll put a titanium cap over it as that ball's worn out a little bit. Sometimes they even got to put a little cap on their hip. But some of the more common hip things we see here in the office. One of the common ones is bursitis here. Trochanteric bursitis. This area right here is the trochanter. And there's a little bursa there, which is a little pad that protects us from getting hit in there. And there's a little bursa or sac that protects that. And that can get inflamed a lot. And that's what hip bursitis is. Now usually there's a lot of ways to get rid of that inflammation there. Laser, ultrasound, they're really bad. A cortisone shot will help as well. But typically that's caused by something else. We have to figure out what's causing that. Maybe it's a short leg. Maybe it's an IT band issue. So that's one of the common things we'll see here in the hip. We'll also see some impingement sometimes the way this ball is moving, it's pinching in the socket. That might be something to look out for as well. But one of those common things we're seeing here is kind of like what we call a runner's knee. So there's a band called the IT band that connects the hip to the knee and it's on the side of your leg. And it kind of helps us do that outside motion. Now the band is about one third muscle and two third fiber. So it's really a bad blood supply there. So it comes with a lot of problems. Also the way we walk and do things tends to create problems. What that band will do is tighten up and it'll tighten and pull. And it can pull on the knee and that'll cause sometimes what we call a runner's knee, where this IT band is pulling the kneecap sideways. We can help you with that. And up at the hip, it can pull or irritate that bursa in there and call that bursitis as well. So we can help you with all that ultrasound laser. Those things work great. Ultimately, we got to figure out what's going on there. I had this problem due to a short leg many years ago. The way we're walking, maybe we need orthotics. Another common thing is that there's some glute weakness here. So your glutes are your rear end muscles back back here. And the fact that we all sit all day long, they tend to get kind of weak and inhibited. So we're sitting on our rear end all day. The glute connects kind of like this from the hip to the rear end and it helps us move that hip. But if we're sitting on it all day, it can get tight and weak and start pulling on the hip as well. So there's a lot of different hip problems. We can help you out with all of them. You should really get to figure out what's going on with them besides it's totally worn out. We can help, but we have to figure out what exactly is going on and then find the root cause of the problem. So most of those are pretty easily treatable if we figure out why they're doing that. Is it the way we're walking? Is it a weak gluteus? Sometimes too, the knee, we can have weakness on the inside of the knee, letting the IT band pull up sideways. So once we get to the root cause of that problem, it's simply pretty easy to address. So if you or anyone you know is having hip problems, give us a call or text at (908) 813-8200.
