5 Factors To Help Choose When It’s Right For You To Have Hip Replacement Surgery

In this video, I’m going to tell you five factors to help choose when it’s right for you to have hip replacement surgery, there’s five things that you can check in your specific situation that can help to guide you on whether or not it’s right for you to do a hip surgery at this time, or if it’s best for you to go naturally, and see if you can relieve your hip arthritis enough for you to get back to doing daily activities without suffering so much.

If you’re looking for more information, including exercises, tips and advice for hip arthritis, I’ve got a playlist of videos for hip arthritis. And it’s linked down in the description below.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgery injections and pain medications. Please consider subscribing to our channel so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos that we post every week.

The first factor is having a loss of motion in your hip. And I don’t mean just like you lost a yesterday or even last week, you have to have a consistent chronic loss of motion in your hip, like three months or more is what we typically look at, if you had a sustained stiffness in your hip that just does not go away, despite trying different things, then you’re on the pathway to having a hip replacement.

And just to show you the different motions of the hip joint here, you have flexion, which is picking up your knee just like so extension would be moving your foot back, caught here, moving your foot back in this direction like this. So there’s the foot, and then you have abduction, which is moving outwards this way and adduction, which is going this way. And then you also have two more emotions that people don’t typically think about.

And this is what I’m going to tell you about is most important to check on yourself, as you have two motions. One is called inward rotation or medial rotation. So your thigh bone is turning this way, think of your kneecap it’s going inwards, despite your foot going outwards because people think that that’s ours rotation, or we’re talking about this.

So when you move this direction, that’s inward rotation, and then this direction will be outward rotation, like you’re going to cross your leg over just like so the most common sign of hip arthritis is a loss of that inward rotation. And so how you can test it on yourself is just sit some place, especially where your feet can dangle and where your legs are straight, at least

Okay, your feet are on the floor, and just move one leg out just like this, you can test how far to go see how it feels in your hip, and then move the other leg out and check to see if it’s equal if it feels the same side aside. And if you find that you’re good on one side, and the other side, just he doesn’t want to go very far and you feel stiff, stuck or painful. In that hip.

Well, you’ve got a loss of motion. And if it’s been there for months, and it’s a chronic loss emotion, that’s going to put you on the path to the hip replacement. But if you feel like it hasn’t been that long and just got stiff, then the good news for you is that you have a good chance of flaring that hip joint down enough to gain your motion back.

The second factor is consistent, painful clicking popping or grinding your hip joint. Now if you’ve got this, you know that you got this in case you’re wondering, Well Does my hip joint pop click or grind. If you’re if you’re not sure, you probably don’t have what I’m talking about. When it’s bad. When your hip is really involved, the cartilage is worn away tremendously. And your kind of beyond the point of being helped out naturally.

That hip joint clicks loudly. I mean, somebody usually can hear it who’s near you. It grinds when you’re moving it especially if you if you’ve been sitting around for a while and haven’t done much. And there might be repetitive clicking once you get going there might be a click every time you take a step a certain way or move your leg in a certain position. If you’re getting that along with pain, it might feel better once it loosens up.

But if it is painful to get it going and you got some clicking or grinding here in the medical field, we call it ratcheting where you’re you feel like you’re your hip has to go to move up or to move down. That ratcheting sensation is literally the bones grinding on each other. And that means your cartilage is way worn down and a hip replacement might not actually be a bad idea.

But if you just get occasional clicking or popping and it just occasionally hurts, not all the time or maybe if it doesn’t even hurt at all, then you’re probably in a situation where you can recover, get the motion normalized back in your hip joint, take the pressures off that hip joints and reduce the popping and clicking or at least make it pain free so that you can tolerate getting up out of your chair getting up in the morning and being on your feet for an extended period of time.

Now as an aside to this at night, oftentimes people with severe hip arthritis when they just subconsciously turn over or move in bed as they’re sleeping, that grind popper quit might wake them up. If you’re having that sign that is probably far gone. But if you don’t have that sign, then that’s good news for you if you’re sleeping through the night, or if you just occasionally wake up because of hip pain, it’s not a consistent thing, like every night it’s happening, then then you’ve got a good chance at helping that your hip joint naturally, the third factor, you’re going to have to potentially put some work into this, if you’ve never tried it out.

This is with weight bearing the if you think about hip arthritis, it’s pressure on the joint extra pressure going through that hip joint, that causes the joint to become irritated. And when it’s like that, over time, over months and years, then arthritis develops. And if it never is resolved, it just gets worse and it progresses.

But if you can go try using a cane, or a walker or maybe even a crutch, something to offload your legs, offload that hip, use your legs temporarily for a time. If you feel that you can do that and it makes your hips better, then you have an excellent situation.

That means that if you can fine tune how you’re offloading your hip. In other words, if you can put a little more pressure to that cane or walker, whatever you’re using, use it more frequently throughout the day or use it at the right periods of time, like when you’re on your feet more like if you go out to the store some specific situation, you know tends to flare you up.

If you can be more strategic with offloading your hip joints, then you have an excellent chance at flaring down that irritated arthritis. And getting into a situation where you don’t need surgery, and you can get back to normal eventually. But this requires you to go out and get a cane if you’ve never got one before, go out and get a walker if you’ve never used them before. And if a cane doesn’t work for you, and you’re serious about trying to avoid surgery, go get the walker, don’t be ashamed.

If you are worried about the social stigma, you know how people are going to look at you, if now you’re using a cane or a hip. If you haven’t really told anybody about your hip problem. Now it’s going to be obvious, you got to try this out, you have to do your due diligence to make sure that your hip is going to heal naturally, that you’re doing everything that you can to make sure that your hip is going to heal naturally. And you got to give it some time about three to seven days.

But you should know within a week, if this is going to work for you or not, you’ve got to wake up, get on the cane or get on the walker. And pretty much all the way until the end of the day, whenever you’re going to go to bed for the for the night, when you need to get your long rest. You’ve got to be using that thing whenever you’re up on your feet to fully test it out and determine if you have a good chance at saving your hip joints, that you give it a good week and you find that it still hurts, it’s still stiff, then this you can pretty much scratches off the list and get tried that it’s not going to work for you.

You have you can have some peace of mind moving forward and your decision to potentially have a hip replacement surgery. And the fourth factor is exercise kind of related to being on your feet. If you try specific exercises like hip stretches, you know muscle strengthening exercises for your hip, there’s tons out there, we’ve got videos, go look in the in the description below.

There’s we’ve got some videos linked there, you might have found other exercises or have been told to do exercises by some healthcare professional, you got to do your due diligence in trying those exercises to make sure they’re going to work for you or not that way you can be done with those and you can move forward. What I can tell you in this short video we have more in other videos is when you tend to work out your hip flexors.

In other words, you work out the front of your hip right here. If those are the muscles you’ve been focusing on, and you’re not getting better, it’s probably not a good idea to do that you probably need to be working on the muscles in the back of your hip in the in the glute area, those muscles tend to be weaker when it comes to hip arthritis. And when you strengthen those muscles, you tend to get much better control over the arthritis flare up that you might be going through right now in your hip.

If you’re seeing someone in the medical field for your hip problem, don’t expect them to know how to heal this naturally. By and large. Our medical system, especially in the United States is geared towards surgery, medications, injections, those kinds of things, and healing cartilage naturally healing arthritis naturally, it’s just not a typical thing done by most healthcare professionals. So don’t get too laid down.

If you find a doctor or physical therapist or some other health care professional that doesn’t really help you out with your hip naturally, I strongly encourage you to check out the exercises that we recommend here on our channel for hip arthritis, start doing those and some of them you might need to be doing regularly like multiple times a day every hour possibly to make sure that you exhaust the benefit of that exercise.

And you can fully determine that this is going to help you solving this naturally with exercise. Or you can scratch it off your list and say let’s go ahead and make an appointment with the surgeon. I’ve tried everything and it’s not going to work for me. I have confidence now moving forward.

Typically with exercise, you should notice an improvement within 24 hours I mean even a minor improvements if you do some exercise and you have to play around with the dosage In other words, with how frequent you do the exercise are you doing it hourly or every once a day or a few times a day? How intense you’re doing the exercise, are you doing tons of reps? Are you adding weight to this is it really intense on your body, and then the type.

Like I said, you might work on your hip flexors or your hip extensors the glute muscles are other muscles as well, that might be influencing your hip arthritis, you do have to play with all these a bit to figure out the right mix for you. And once you find something that helps you if you’ve tried a variety of things, and you find that you there was a one set of exercises or one exercise even that did benefits you a bit, then you’ve got to double down on that triple, quadruple down on that start doing that exercise more in you don’t have to do a ton of exercises, if you just do one exercise that helps you repeatedly, like some glute exercise, which we often recommend.

And you find that it’s helping you chip away at it chip away at it strengthening just takes time, and reps, you might just be 1000 reps away from feeling decent in your hip, you might be 2000 reps away from being able to stand for 30 minutes without paying for it the next day, you might just be three or 4000 steps away from feeling confident about saying no to going to the surgeon’s office for hip replacements.

But you’ve got to put in that time, that diligence and that effort on strengthening your muscles the right way. The fifth factor you got to consider when deciding when it’s right for you to have a hip replacement or not, is your personal lifestyle, you have to answer a few questions about yourself in the future. Who do you want to be? What kinds of things do you want to be doing? Are you still working?

Does your hip problem keeps you from working comfortably or spending time with your family or friends comfortably? All those things you have to weigh and it boils down to this question about your function about the way that you operate throughout the day. How much time do you think you’ll be spending on your feet? Because maybe you’re flared up right now. And it’s not reasonable for you to be on your feet more than five or 10 minutes because your hip just hurts too much.

But if you were to extend that time to 30 minutes or 60 minutes, then would you possibly say no to hip replacements, or maybe you’d say yeah, I still want the replacement because I want people to go for hours. It really depends on your personal decision. I have some patients here that are very content to never do anything extreme.

They don’t want to go hiking and mountains or exercising for long periods of time, they just want to do easygoing things with their family and loved ones as they age. And so getting a replacement is not really right for them. If the longest period of time they’re going to be standing on their feet and walking is going to be maybe an hour going to the store or something like that.

But if we have a more adventurous type of person who want has pets, for instance, dogs that need to go get exercise regularly, tons of kids grandkids are something that they want to go spend time with. They want to vacation sightsee be on their feet for long periods of time. And their hip is really slowing them down today.

And the idea of being on your feet more than an hour is just torturous to you because you tend to do more than that, then maybe a hip replacement is right for you in the future, I would still advise, go through all the other stuff we talked about go check your range of motion get on a cane or some a walker crutches if you need to do the right exercises, fix all those other things, before you decide definitively, you’re going to have a hip replacement or not.

Now the good news about hip replacements is they tend to be pretty successful these days and successful in that they don’t have a lot of complications, they don’t tend to the nothing tends to go wrong with them. It’s pretty rare. So for most surgeries, it’s that’s really good. I think I the most recent number that I saw is a 2% complication rate, which is excellent for it for surgery, the real question that I would pose to you is, did you fix the root muscle imbalance because there’s some muscle imbalance that got you into hip arthritis, which led you to get the hip replacements.

And if you never did your due diligence to exercise correctly and fix that muscle imbalance, then you’re still going to carry that muscle imbalance with you. After you have a hip replacement surgery, which is going to set up some other problem. After you recover from the hip replacements, possibly a nice situation a back problem the other hip or other knee is going to get involved maybe an ankle or foot problem. It’s just a matter of time as those muscle imbalances begin to cause your body to move in appropriately. And they’ll get worse as time goes on.

But if you can fix that muscle imbalance now whether or not you decide to have a hip replacement surgery, you’ll be better for it. But you’ll get to avoid the hip replacement surgery altogether. Or you can have your hip replacement surgery because you’re going to be on your feet for long periods of time and be very active. And you’ll have confidence that you’re not going to end up with some other surgery.

This will be the last surgery you have definitively. So I hope this was helpful for you in determining if you’re going to have a hip replacement or not. Maybe not today, but in the future, you’re going to think about it or maybe you already are signed up for hip replacement surgery and you’re second guessing yourself.

Use this information to either comfort yourself in your decision or maybe you need to cancel your appointment and postpone it and give it give it a good go naturally either way I wish you the best of luck in your hip replacements and don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already thanks so much friends and we’ll see in the next video. Bye