5 Powerful Tips To Avoid Hip Replacement Surgery For Bone On Bone Hip Arthritis

In this video today I’m going to be showing you five powerful tips to help you avoid hip replacement surgery if you’ve got bone-on-bone, hip joint arthritis. Tip number four is especially unusual. So, make sure you watch all the tips, so you catch everything and implemented in your life. So, you don’t have to deal with having a hip replacement surgery, or at the very least delaying hip replacement surgery so that you can move better now and enjoy life to the fullest.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh Finn, 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 you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos we post every single week. So, let’s get to it.

Tip number one sleep with a pillow between your knees and sleep on your side. If you’ve got a bone-on-bone hip arthritis situation, you’ve got to sleep on your side with a pillow between your knees. And let me show you why I’m going to bring the skeleton over. And we’ve taken one leg off of this skeleton who almost got taken out there. But if you look at this hip joint right here, if you imagine sleeping in this position right here with the hip kind of bent like that, the more inward the leg goes, the more it pinches at the hip joint right here.

If you got a bone-on-bone situation, you just bring the bones at the ball and socket joint closer together, the more your legs come together. So, to show you what that looks like, in my body lying down on my side, let me show you, if I were to lie down just like this, if my legs are touching together like this, at that hip joint, the ball and socket come closest together. And if you’ve already got a bone-on-bone situation, it’s just going to pinch it, pressurize it more and potentially aggravated while you’re just sleeping.

A simple solution is going to be to get a pillow The thicker the better. Right there between your knees. And of course, you got your pillow up here, however else you like to have pillows with your arms and head. But if you just do this right here and even put two pillows and get in this position where you can rest your legs down onto a soft surface and get that hip joint open. They actually called an open pack position the medical field meaning the ball and socket joint is in the most open position where there’s most space and least amount of pressure inside the joint.

Simply by putting pillows between your knees, you get in that open pack position where you’re setting it up to not get aggravated at night. This way, you can sleep more restfully you’re hopefully waking up less at night, and you’re less stiff in the morning because you’ve been in that depressurize position most of the night.

Now of course, you’ll toss and turn and move around and possibly kick that pillow off the end of the bed or off the side of the bed. But the hope is that the more time you can spend in that position and reset yourself up in that position, the less irritated your hip joint will be by the time morning comes.

Tip number two, move your thighs in and out. Now what this looks like is I want you to fidget I literally want you to be sitting and doing this right here. Just be wiggling your legs all the time, you need to get into the habit of just being a fidgeter when it comes to sitting down and moving like this. I mean if you like to sit in a recliner, or if you’d like to just be in any position, just wiggle your legs.

Because what that does, at the hip joint again, that ball and socket is kind of pressurized the bone-on-bone situation means that cartilage has been compressed excessively. And if you just wiggle it around like that the fluid inside between the ball and socket joint begins to move around and that provides nourishment to the cartilage. We know that cartilage doesn’t have a good blood supply.

That’s where most of our body tissues get nourishment from, but the fluid that’s inside the joint is another source of nutrition to the cartilage. So, if you can get that fluid to move around because it doesn’t have a circulatory system to pump the fluid around, it’s based on movement. So, if you’re sedentary if you just go long periods of time, and maybe you’re not like the most sedentary person in the world, but there’s stretches of time, more than 30 minutes that go by where you don’t really move a whole lot, then that fluid inside the hip joint doesn’t get a chance to circulate and nourish the cartilage around.

So, if you are sitting watching a movie watching a television program, watching the news, watching YouTube, then you need to just be wiggly you need to be in the habit of fidgeting, moving your legs around just so you can get that little bit of motion inside your joint and move the fluid.

Having this habit is critical to making sure that your hip joint can heal and flare down. So, you’re in a position where despite having a bone-on-bone hip joint situation like we’re If you’ve been diagnosed via an x ray, you feel fine, you can get around because your hip joint isn’t irritated, because it’s well nourished.

Now, tip number three speaking about nourishment is you need to be drinking plenty of water and you need to get supplements in you, joint specific supplements. Now, let me just talk about water for a moment, a lot of people are confused about how much water to drink. And I always hear people kind of begin to complain about how much they’re going to have to go to the bathroom. And yeah, it’s true, you’re going to be going to the bathroom quite a bit when you up your water intake, but it’s okay, make it convenient for yourself to get to the bathroom, if you need to get a walker or a cane.

Or if you need to sit closer to the bathroom. Or if you need to get a bedside commode deal, then go for it because it’s going to save you from risking yourself at having that hip replacement surgery, if you think that you can avoid it. And it’s something that you desire to do, because some people want to get the hip surgery, the replacement. And that’s fine if you want to do that.

But if you’re in the camp right now, where you want to avoid it, or at least delay it, then you’ve got to be adequately hydrated, you’ve got to drink plenty of water because cartilage, which lines the ball and socket joints is 60 to 70% water. And if you don’t have enough water going through your system, through your body systems, then the cartilage inside your hip joint is just not going to be as lubricated as it could be, which means there’s going to be more friction inside the joint. Because part of the reason why cartilage is so slick and hydrated so that it can move freely with minimal resistance with minimal friction. So, you’ve got to stay hydrated.

Now the other components of cartilage are found in supplements that are that are out there and readily available supplements like conjoined and glucosamine and there’s other anti-inflammatory supplements out there like turmeric and MSN. These supplements you can get from just about any nutrition store, you can find them at groceries often at grocery stores. And you can also order them online and I’ve included a link for a supplement that I really like it’s in the description below. You can go check it out. It’s one that’s offered on Amazon. And there’s other versions of it.

Now you can go way into detail about which brand is better than others and price of brand some brands cost a lot more than others you can get you know the generic brand that stores might offer. However, you want to approach it just begin to experiment and take adequate supplements and also drink plenty of water.

Also having a healthy diet that does not include a bunch of inflammatory foods, specifically foods that are high in carbohydrates, like food, Thai and sugar and flour, and all those type those types of things even fruit to eat tons of fruit. That is a lot of sugar.

Tons of dairy is also a lot of sugar. There’s fructose in fruit, which is a type of sugar. And lactose is in dairy products, which is a type of sugar as well. If you can minimize the sugar in your diet, generally our bodies in a less inflammatory state, which helps to reduce arthritis flare ups.

And when it comes to water and how much to drink. It is dependent on your size if you’re a smaller person and obviously you’ll need less water if you’re a bigger person you need more water. A good starting points kind of a place to a goal to achieve is 100 ounces of water. Or if you’re in the metric system, three liters of water is about the equivalent give or take a few ounces.

If you can drink that much water in a day, you should be relatively hydrated. If you’re going to the bathroom every couple of hours or so that means you’re also pretty hydrated. Now my favorite thing to do, I’m not a water slipper, I can’t just sip a little bit of water at a time that’s just not my thing, especially with a busy day for treating patients. And when I get home, I’m busy with family and all that I have one of these giant things of water this is 40 ounces of water, I will drink two to three of these two and a half is about what I drink, sometimes three of them and I will chug at least half if not more each time I go to drink water.

So usually, first thing in the morning I drink half to two thirds of one of these things I’ve never been able to finish a complete one all at once. I think my stomach just can’t hold that much. But I get pretty full after drinking about two thirds of this. And then I go refill it and then by lunchtime I’m drinking again by dinnertime and drinking again and sometimes in between I’ll have some sips if my mouth gets dry, or if I just have a moment to drink some if I’m sitting at the computer or if I’m sitting at home, you know with the kids or something if we’re all talking having dinner or something.

I am drinking tons of water and try to minimize the other fluids that I might drink that actually dehydrate you like coffee, tea, sodas, virtually all other fluids will dehydrate you except for certain things out there like coconut water and it’s debated that dairy products can hydrate you as well. But then you got to deal with the sugars too. So your best bet is to drink water and if you’re just not a water person, like you like to have a you know a flavor drink of some sorts start there if you’ve never been drinking enough fluids if you haven’t been drinking enough fluids.

Look to wean yourself off of the sweet fluids as much as possible, that’s going to bring down your inflammation so that you have the best chance at flaring down and delaying that hip replacement surgery or avoiding it all together so you can get back to being active again.

Tip number four, no, this is the weird one that I was talking about. But squeezes a lot of people don’t do this, they think they need to be doing a bunch of standing exercises or, you know, more gym like exercises. But literally just sitting where you are, if you’re standing, squeezing your butt muscles, so like right now I’m sitting down, and I can tighten up my butt muscles in my body will elevate just a smidge.

Whenever I squeeze my butt muscles, if you can squeeze your butt muscles and hold it for 10 seconds or longer, that’s going to be beneficial for your hip joint. And you’ve got to do this in a way that doesn’t hurt your hips, you might need to position your legs in an open position or bring them a little bit closer together, play around with the position of your legs, so that you can squeeze your butt muscles without causing any hip pain. And the second part of this is you don’t want to use your thigh muscles.

If you are squeezing your butt muscles, and you feel like your thighs are going to the front of your thighs, the inside of the back to your thigh, and then lighten up on how hard you’re squeezing. Now ideally you want to squeeze 100% back there and really tight up those muscles for that 10 seconds.

But if you’re if you can’t help but fire thigh muscles, then back off, and only do like 50% or 60 or 70% and find the right intensity of glute contraction that you can do butt muscle contraction without tightening up the five muscles in hang out there. And what you should find is over the course of a few days of practicing this, I mean you got to get obsessed with the glutes.

Over the course of a few days of becoming obsessed with tightening your glutes all day long, then you should be able to find that your glutes can tighten harder, you can increase the intensity that you’re tightening. Without firing your thigh muscles, you’ve just got to increase what we call the neuromuscular coordination or the connection from the brain to the muscle the neuro muscular coordination, where you can fire the right muscles without everything else firing at the same time.

This is important because of the ball and socket joint of the hip. When you have stronger buttock muscles, it offloads the hip joint and allows the cartilage to down irritate it to flare down or become less irritated because it relieves the pressure at the hip joint and allows your bone-on-bone hip joint situation to actually heal a bit enough for you to tolerate more walking more activity. And possibly delay or completely avoid having that hip replacement.

So, when I say get obsessed with this, I literally mean do this, like all day long, like set a timer that goes off every 20 or 30 minutes at the very most every 60 minutes every hour. And when that timer goes off, squeeze your butt muscles roll hard for 10 seconds, and then relax. It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting or standing, you could be on a road trip, you could be you know, going somewhere in a car on the bus on a plane, you could be sitting at work, you could be sitting at home, you could be having a meal, you could be standing.

And in standing, your butt muscles should be tightening up, nobody should notice you can do it discreetly where nobody’s really realizing it. And it doesn’t have to be sudden or exaggerated, you could just do it enough to get the muscles to tighten up and fatigue a bit. 10 second holds 10 times or 100 seconds is usually adequate to wake them up to get the ball and socket to get in a better position.

And the more you do this over time, the stronger the muscles get up to a certain level. But most importantly, you’re depressurizing the hip joint all day long. Because if you just do this once a day or a few times a day, it is not enough, you’re going to stay irritated in your hip joint. It’s got to be spread out throughout the day.

The tip number five is you’ve got to self-massage your thigh muscles. Chances are if you have hip osteoarthritis, you’ve got a bone on bone, hip arthritis situation, then you have a massive muscle imbalance that you’ve been working on for years, if not decades of your life. And it’s culminated at this point to your hip just bothering you. It’s an angry hip and it’s hurting you when you first get up in the morning. It’s hurting you to walk around and be on your feet.

And the imbalance is that your butt muscles have gotten weak, and your thigh muscles have become dominant and it’s causing an increased pressure inside your hip joint. So, we’ve talked about firing your glutes to offload the hip joint, but another angle that you could take, and I wouldn’t replace it you’ve got to do all of this together. You’ve got to calm down the quad muscles are usually too active, too strong and you just got to massage them.

Now I’m going to show you what to do with your hands and I’ll show you where to do with different tools. Some of you might already have a home some of you might need a purchase. Whatever you want to do is fine as long as you can get the quad muscles right here to relax. So, from about Your hip bone right here to the front of your of your thigh where your kneecap is, this whole stretch of muscles.

On the front of your thigh are muscles that can become over dominant and short. And if you just dig in there just like so you can do two hands or one in find any tender spots, any spots that feel like there’s a knot there, or like it hurts. And you rub it out, like right there, my mind is kind of wanting to hurt right there, I feel good, thankfully. But I’d say if I’m going to pick a tender spot, it’s right there. And you might have lumps some people actually have little lumps, like where they feel a nodule in there.

That’s what I’m talking about. That’s a spot where the muscles overactive. And it’s, it’s not healthy. And you’ve got to rub it out, gently do it in such a way that isn’t hurting you or you’re like wincing in pain, but gently move it around and get it to free up. And if you just hang out on one spot for about a minute or so it generally will free up and allow the whole muscle to lengthen a bit can become less active. And if you’ve already been working your glutes on top of that, you’re depressurizing your joint from the other end of it, you’re getting stronger back here using your glutes, and you’re waking those glute muscles.

But now you’re taking pressure off from the front, which further deep pressurizes the hip joint. So, spend some time just going through the muscle. And you can use your hands like that. Something simply, you can use as well as a rolling pin. If you’ve got a rolling pin at home, this is a mini one that I borrowed from my kids.

But you can use a giant rolling pin as well. And you just roll over that spot that is tender, you can roll the whole quad muscle all the way up to the hip bone just don’t go over the bone with this you want to stay where the muscle is where the tissue is a little bit softer, don’t be on the end of a bone. And same thing, you just roll it back and forth for about a minute or two. And you can do different spots. Generally, if you find a tender spot, you don’t need to be on it for more than a minute.

Another option you can use is a tennis ball or lacrosse ball or racquetball some sort of firm ball, I’ve got tennis balls here. And you can rub this in. Just like that you can also lay on this, there’s all kinds of ways people do this for they lay down in it to dig really hard or they lean up against a wall and press the ball up against the wall and then press or leg up against the wall. And however, you want to do this, I think it’s kind of aggressive.

If you’re having a wince and fight through this. For me, this is good pressure. I feel a little bit of tenderness right here. But it’s bearable, I’m not going to wince or cry over this, this feels okay. And again, you just want to hang out there for a minute or two, find any lumps and just gently roll them out, you can decrease the pressure by just using one hand or you can add more pressure by using two hands me you can go forward and back just like this, you can go side to side, I was doing circles, there isn’t a wrong way to do this, there’s a right way to do this, the whole idea is just to get that muscle to soften up.

Now this is something that I would do frequently as well. I mean, every hour would be fantastic. The more time you can spend calming down this thigh muscle in the front. And then simultaneously waking up the glute muscle in the back, you’re setting up your hip joint to move better. And if you want to get a higher end tool that is definitely more effective.

A massage gun is a really good option for massaging your thigh and it’s easy to get to on your own, you don’t have to have any help from anyone. I’ve got one here. And I love this massage gun, I just got this one. And I’ll show it to you, it is a local brand. Since I purchased this, they’ve upgraded it, I put a link in the description below for the very gun, you might see that it’s a little bit different. They have different colors, I got the light silver, but they had a dark gray and a black. And, and I saw one that had different letters on here as well. But it looks like the same style.

It was definitely the same brand to loco. And it’s pretty powerful. It’s a little heavier than other ones we’ve used in the past. But it’s pretty good. It’s got good power; the battery life is great. I think I’ve only charged it once I’ve had it for a while now. So, to operate this one, there’s a switch in the bottom, you’ve got to turn it on. And then there’s a screen in the back that has the controls. So, there’s the power button, it’s at 80% charge right now that it’s on level one, I can increase it to whatever level I want.

I’m going to put it on level 10 For now, and I’m going to do is work that stiff muscle out and this is so much easier than rubbing it out with a rolling pin or a ball and it’ll save you time as well. And if you’ve got hip arthritis if you got a bone-on-bone hip joint situation, these things right about $100 Give or take, you might get them on a sale where there, you know, 15 or $20 less or maybe they’re a bit more. I mean, I would pay plenty for this thing.

A hip replacement surgery will run you about $20,000 now hopefully insurance covers that for you but you still got to pay deductibles, you’re still going to pay 1000s Potentially depending on your insurance coverage. You might have better coverage than that. But 100 bucks is a piece of cake, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to 1000s of dollars, plus all the rehab that you have to go through afterwards, the actual surgery, the procedure, the pain, the discomfort, this feels kind of good, I’m not doing in a way that’s painful.

I’ll take this over surgical incisions and having to deal with wounds and being in the hospital. No thanks. If I’m not in a situation where I have to have any replacement, I’m going to give me a massage gun and do some exercises and stay hydrated, have some supplements, all the things I talked about are a much more affordable, easier thing to do. Plus, you get to feeling better a lot quicker, as long as you’re in a situation where you can do it.

Now, let me give you a disclaimer while we’re here, as I’m finishing this up. If your hip is just so stuck, that is making a bunch of grinding noise, every time you move it, it you’ve tried this stuff and it’s not working, you probably need a hip replacement, you’ll probably do better and you’re just better off getting hip replacement. So, no one to throw in the towel, no one to call it quits.

Typically, if your hip is making a ton of noise, every time you move it, it’s repeatable. You know, there’s some people that have up days and down days, if your days are always down, I mean, you just can’t move, your hip range of motion is gone. If you know it’s very limited in one side versus the other side, you really can’t walk very far at all, and you don’t have good days.

That’s the key if you don’t have good days where you actually can walk, and you can move better. Because if that situation, you could depressurize your hip joint doing this stuff and move a lot better. But if you’re having all bad days, then your hip joint cartilage might just be so worn down, that it’s not going to recover and getting a hip replacement is going to be a good idea I would go get a second or third opinion even just to verify that you should get a hip replacement. And you might even try around a physical therapy talks with physical therapists.

We’ve had patients that have come into our office hoping to avoid having a hip replacement surgery and I’ve turned them away on the first visit. I said this is far gone, I can’t help you. No amount of physical therapy is going to improve this hip joint. It’s just it needs to be replaced. And that’s the best thing for some people. But that’s really the rarity one out of 10 will be like that most people nine out of 10 cases can recover tremendously once they start doing the right things.

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