3 Most Common Causes Of Hip Pain
Hip pain is seriously concerning for people, even people in the medical field because it deals with the hip joint itself. Which, if a problem persists, there can lead to a hip joint replacement. Today on this video, I’m going to be telling you the three most common causes to hip pain, and what’s causing each one of them.
My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy. This channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active, and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgeries, injections, and pain medications, please subscribe to our channel and turn on your notifications so that you don’t miss any of the helpful videos that we put out every single week.
Well, let’s get to the common causes for each of these causes. I’m going to talk through the symptoms and the causes, like the root causes of them. And then also I’m going to ask answer, the question of Can this be helped naturally can be fixed naturally.
The first common cause of hip pain is hip osteoarthritis
We’ll call it arthritis, because that’s the most common term that people use, but just know that there’s different types of arthritis. So for hip arthritis, the symptoms that you’ll commonly see are pain, the front of the hip stiffness when getting up in the morning, or if you’ve been sitting for a while, and a loss of motion.
What I mean by this is it right in the front of your hip, like where your leg meets your body on the front, where if you were to pick up your knee, or your body folds right there, that’s the hip joint area. And that’s the area that hip arthritis commonly feel it’s felt in that area company since pain to that area.
So if you’re waking up in the morning, and your first steps, your first 5-10 minutes, maybe longer for you 20-40 minutes, or maybe a whole hour is spent just trying to loosen up because you’re hopping around because your hip is kind of stiff, that’s a very common sign of hip arthritis tends to affect people that are older as well, like 50s and older.
But it can affect people in younger ages. It just depends on how long they’ve had hip problems, and it can lead into hip arthritis, the loss of motion means if you pick up your knee towards your chest on one side, the side that isn’t bothering you, and then you test it against the other side.
And if there’s a difference, if your painful sides doesn’t go as far, then that’s a loss of motion, it can happen in other ways, too, like moving your leg outwards from your body, or rotating your knee, like rotating your whole thigh so your foot goes out and in that is rotation of the hip. And if it’s different on one side versus the other, then you have a loss of motion. And that’s a common sign of hip arthritis.
The causes of hip arthritis are usually something called muscle imbalances. That just means that there’s muscles on one side of the hip that are stronger than the other side, and at the ball and socket joints is causing the joint to not operate. Normally, the forces from those stronger muscles are pulling the ball off the socket slightly in a different direction.
If that’s how you move every day, for years, then it starts to wear on the joint a bit faster than it’s supposed to. It can set up this hip arthritis problem. Other related causes or prior injuries. Like if you’ve been in car accidents where you had a hip issue, if you had falls where you hurt your hip.
If you have old sports injuries, or you’re really active in housework, or you had a very labor intensive job and you felt your hip bother you from time to time, those little injuries can definitely add up over the years and as somebody hits her 50s and beyond, can set up some serious hip arthritis.
Now can it heal? Naturally? The simple answer is yes.
If you think of hip arthritis as an inflamed joints, because that’s what arthritis means that joint inflammation. Think of your skin if you were to scratch your skin without cutting yourself. But to give it a good scratch, it would leave red marks that skin inflammation that will go away within a matter of minutes, maybe an hour at most. Skin heals really fast and reacts really fast. joints and cartilage inside joints are the slowest healing tissue in the body.
So it’s just going to react a lot slower. And just like if you were to scratch your skin in your hand, if you were to keep doing that it would stay irritated for a long time as long as you keep irritating it on the inside of joints. joints are designed to take pressures and move.
But if your movement isn’t normal, because you’ve got these muscle imbalances or these old injuries that have accumulated over the years, then that lining of the joint the cartilage never gets a chance to fully heal and become an irritated.
So that constant irritation over time is what can set up the arthritis. What needs to happen to manage this arthritis over time is you need to learn how to deal with the new learn what you can tolerate what you can’t tolerate and you need to get stronger as well to fix that muscle imbalance. It’s important to get those weaker muscles very strong so that you’re not dealing with that imbalance or one side stronger than the other.
But doing these things sets up the joint lining the inside of the joint to calm down And although you might have an X ray, if you’re feeling better, you might still see bumpy surfaces on the ball and socket joint. But it is possible to have X ray arthritis, but feel fine be able to go up and down stairs, you’re going to walk, be less stiff in the morning, when you get up, even be able to be quite active and do activities like running or cycling stuff where you’re on your feet for a while.
As long as you have the strength and you’ve worked up to it over time, you’re not getting to it too fast. But take comfort in that it is possible to fix hip arthritis problems and manage it over time without ever having to have a hip replacement, or rely on hip injections and pain medications.
The second most common hip problem is hip bursitis.
The classic signs for hip bursitis is pain on the outside of the hip. And it tends to come on with overdoing it somehow sometimes it’s acutely overdoing it, meaning all of a sudden you started to take on this project and you’re on your feet and you’re up and down, and you’re way more active than you were before you decided to go on this hike or this walk or run or something like that exercise, and you went from not doing a whole lot to all of a sudden doing a lot.
That’s what tends to set up hip arthritis. Another common symptom related to hip arthritis is joint stiffness. So if you’ve got hip arthritis that we talked about before, it’s going to make your hip joint stiff, then it can set up the hip bursitis a lot quicker. If you’re younger than 50. If you don’t have hip arthritis quite yet, it is still possible to get stiffness inside the hip that will free up easily over time doing the right things.
But that stiffness, that but that stiffness in the hip can set up hip bursitis on the outside of the hip, the most common causes of hip bursitis the root problems is one being out of shape. And I mean this with respect, you might be in shape to do the things you need to do. But if you go try to do some activity that’s requiring you that’s requiring you to do a lot more than you’ve done recently, then you’re out of shape for that activity, it’s a relativity thing.
If you’ve got weaknesses if you’ve if you’ve been sedentary and you’ve been sitting in front of the couch, especially if you’re during pandemic time, you haven’t done a whole lot outdoors, or haven’t gone to the gym, have an exercise, and then all of a sudden you start to do it that can set you up for hip bursitis. If you increase your activity kind of quick, can hit bursitis heal naturally.
Yes, let me explain how, by telling you a little bit about what the bursitis even is, it’s a fluid filled sac that’s kind of between tendons and the bone on the outside of your hip, there’s a lot of tendons that attach to the outside and help feed the muscles in the movement for the hip joints. And that Bursa is there to offload and deep pressure the tendons against themselves and against the bone of the hip of the thigh bone.
And if there’s excessive pressures on that verse, it can become irritated. And that’s why they call it bursitis. So in order to treat this effectively, it’s important to rest at the beginning to make sure that you stopped doing that activity that’s that you’re overdoing it with, you need to literally take some time off need to sit around rest, let it calm down. And then once it’s manageable, for you may not be 100% gone.
But once you feel like it’s not hurting you to do everyday things, then it’s time to start doing very specific exercises. Oftentimes, the muscles in the glute area of the butt area are weak and those need to get stronger. There can be other issues, it can be a foot problem, surprisingly, we see that often.
It can be core muscles in the ABS that are also weak that are leading to the hip bursitis. But it’s important to find where the weakest muscles are, and make sure that those get stronger so that as activities increasing, it’s not putting excessive pressures on that Versa overtime.
Now there is a surgery I’ve heard of a surgery being done on one client so far over the years, where they take out the bursa, but it was unsuccessful. The Bursa actually grew back on this patient and the doctor was talking about taking it out again because it got inflamed again, they got bursitis a second time after they had already had the bursitis surgery.
And what the root problem was in this lady’s all the stuff that I’m talking about, she was out of shape. She wasn’t moving well she had weaknesses and areas that were feeding into the bursitis problem. And no matter how many surgeries she’s going to have for this, it’s going to keep coming back she needs to fix the root problems which we did, so that the pressures are off the bursa and it can heal naturally and can be maintained over time she could do all the normal activities that she wants to do.
The third most common hip pain problem is sciatica.
Sciatica is on the backside of the hip in the buttock area, there’s a big giant nerve that comes out of the bones of the hips of the pelvis, that run it’s right in the meat of the butt and it goes down into the back of the thigh, the back of the knee, the calf area.
There’s some nerves that wrap around the lower leg and go into the heel, the bottom of the foot and down into the toes. And it is possible to get pain, cramping, numbness, tingling anywhere along that area.
Typically people get numbness, tingling and cramping on the back of their leg, knee calf and down into the foot, heel even. But the most common presentation of Sciatica, especially when it’s just starting out his pain right in the back of the hip right in the bud area, it’s just uncomfortable. And it can be debilitating.
In some cases, it can prevent people from standing all the way up, or being able to bend forward to reach their feet to put on their socks and shoes. It can stop them from finding a comfortable position at night to sleep, they can get comfortable sitting or standing or lying down, it doesn’t matter what side of the line on their back on the left and the right, they’re uncomfortable.
And it’s usually because that nerve is being pinched somehow. And you just need to take pressures off in order to find relief. But there’s a whole process to that the causes of sciatica are old injuries that have added up over time, weaknesses as well overdoing it, but specifically overdoing it in a way where they’re lifting a lot of heavy things, or having to bend over and pick up things that are kind of heavier for that person to carry.
Oftentimes with exercise that comes on with weightlifting, when lifting weights inappropriately, or doing too much too soon, and not preparing to pick up that kind of weight, and getting in shape enough to pick up that weight that can set up that person to develop a static a problem.
The most common cause that we see those somebody is at home and they’re doing some deep cleaning, or they’re doing some yard work that’s kind of intense, and they’re having to pick up heavy things like furniture or moving is another common one without having to pick up furniture and pick up heavy boxes. And then they start to get sad.
After that, that’s the most common cause that we see. Can sadness, you’re naturally Yes, 100%. In fact, if you’re ever recommended to have a surgery for sciatica problem, I’m going to ask you to stop and go get a second opinion right away because the sciatic nerve is huge runs from your lower back all the way down to your toes.
And there’s many points along that nerve where you can get pressure we can get pinched, and it can set off pain all along the area, you might have a pinched nerve up in your hip or back that’s causing foot pain, or vice versa, you might have a pinched nerve down in the foot ankle that’s causing pain up in the hip and back.
So having a back surgery may not solve the whole problem. opportunity for sciatica usually involves seeing a physical therapist and manual physical therapists, somebody who knows how to move the bones and shift joints and muscles and all that stuff. But people will also see surgeons for this and it surgeons are looking at the spine and the discs in the spine in the holes where the nerves come out of the spine.
Because those nerves eventually feed into the sciatic nerve, the big sciatic nerve that comes down the leg. But if a surgeon recommends to you to have the disc cut, it may be helpful but it may not be the whole picture.
I’m not saying that surgeons completely wrong. I’m not saying I’m not discrediting the surgeon, I’m just I’m giving you information that makes sure that you see the full picture, it can be pinched elsewhere.
And the most common place that we see the sciatic nerve pinched is right in the bud area where the pelvis bones are the bones that make up the hip joints, the socket side of hip joints, they can get shifted and compress the nerve and there’s no surgery to fix that. And once that the bones are put in place, then that nerve can be a lot happier. And you may never need to have a disc surgery ever.
You can live with a herniated disc and be just fine the rest of your life. I hope this helped out just to round out the top three causes of hip pain, you have hip arthritis, hip bursitis, and sciatica.
Those are the big three reasons that people often get hip problems and rewind this video, check it out. If you miss some of the symptoms, some of the causes, I want you to figure out what best fits your situation and realize that it is possible to have multiple situations all happening at the same time, you can have arthritis with bursitis and statical. simultaneously. It’s a very bad day, if you’ve got that going on.
But even if you have all three simultaneously, you can get better naturally without surgery. Hope you learned a lot in this video. If you’re looking for some professional help for your hip problem, then we can help you out what I recommend is go down to the bottom of this page and find the button that says request a free discovery visit and what I want you to do is is hit that button and it’ll open up a form that allows you to apply for our free discovery visit.
We’ve got a limited amount of these per week. And you’ve got to qualify to get into this discover visit. So by entering in your details, our staff will receive it review it and they’ll give you a call to take it to the next steps in the application process. And if all works out, then you’ll get a complimentary 20 minute discovery visit with a specialist physical therapist will diagnose your problem of course we’ll take a look at you hands on and we can do this virtually as well.
If we need to Do a telehealth call. We’ll do that. And we’ll watch you move through the through the camera. And then we’ll be able to diagnose a problem and tell you what’s going on. And we’ll give you a chance to ask all the questions to the specialist so that you can leave that appointment, knowing the best information to make the best decision moving forward on your hip problem.
All you got to do is leave us your details on that form. And we’ll call you back first chance we get I hope that you have a fast recovery. Have a wonderful day.
