Stop wondering whether your knee is something you just have to live with.
A practical, clinician-led plan for knee pain and arthritis.
Explore Fesera CareRemote care in Lagos and across Nigeria, where suitable. In-person assessment is available in selected Lagos areas when needed.
When knee pain starts limiting you
Getting out of a low chair is the hard part. Stairs, particularly coming down. Standing through a service or an event and paying for it afterwards.
Stiff first thing in the morning, but it loosens up within about twenty minutes. Aches after you have been sitting. You have started taking the lift, or sending someone else upstairs to get things.
Maybe an X-ray already told you it is arthritis, and the conversation ended roughly there.
The thing nobody told you
Joints are not tyres.
The most common belief about arthritis is that using the joint wears it out faster. That belief stops more people getting better than the arthritis does.
Joints are living tissue that respond to being used. When you stop using a painful knee, the muscles around it weaken, so the joint gets less support, so it hurts more.
Exercise is the single best supported treatment there is for knee arthritis. Not an addition to treatment. The main thing.
Why it keeps getting worse
It also gets stiffer through the range you have stopped using. So ordinary things start to hurt, and you do even less.
A few other things you were probably told
- The noise means it's grinding away.Painless clicking, cracking and grinding is very common and predicts nothing.
- Surgery is inevitable.Some people do need a replacement, and it works very well when it is genuinely indicated. Many people who assume they are on that path are not.
- It's just age.Plenty of people your age have the same X-ray and no pain at all.
- It's definitely arthritis.Not every painful knee is an arthritic one, and knee pain sometimes comes from the hip or the back. That is worth checking properly, particularly if knee treatment has never worked.
What actually helps
Strengthening the muscles around the joint, properly loaded and built up over time. Not stretching, and not a few leg lifts. Keeping walking. Doing it often enough to matter, which mostly means at home between visits.
The goal isn't just to reduce pain. It's to help you understand enough that you're no longer afraid of using it.
When to see a doctor first
The knee is hot, badly swollen, and you feel unwell or feverish.
A knee that locks, gives way, or that you cannot straighten. Significant swelling after a fall. Pain that wakes you every night regardless of what you did. Morning stiffness well over half an hour, in several joints.
The questions we ask before any booking cover this.
Is it your hip instead?
About this information
This page provides general information. Your symptoms, health history and examination determine which care is appropriate for you.
Read about Fesera’s clinical leadership and our clinical scope.
Further reading: NICE: osteoarthritis assessment and management.
Find out whether it can be improved before you accept that it can't.
Start with an assessment and agree the next step with your physiotherapist.
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