Your body contains between 250-350 individual joints. Joints, the places where your bones meet and connect, allow your skeleton to bend, rotate, and shift. Without full joint function, your full range of motion is likely to be impaired.
There are a lot of reasons why you might end up suffering from joint dysfunction at some point in your life, from arthritis to injury. If you have a joint that doesn’t work right, or gives you pain or discomfort, it can have wide-ranging negative impacts on your whole-body health and wellness.
At Performance Pain & Sports Medicine of Lawrenceville and Raritan, New Jersey, and Houston, Texas, Dr. Matthias Wiederholz, Dr. Suzanne Manzi, and their team take a whole-body approach to your biomechanics, making sure you can move without restriction.
Your joints can stop working correctly due to a number of factors, as well as in a variety of different ways. The right treatment plan to restore your full joint function depends on the nature of your joint dysfunction.
You might suffer from degeneration in a specific joint due to a chronic condition like arthritis, that can eat away at cushioning cartilage and cause pain and inflammation in your affected joints. Or, you might have joint dysfunction as a result of repetitive use, as in tennis elbow, or as a result of an injury or trauma.
When a joint doesn’t function correctly, motion can become grinding, jerky, or impeded. Pain and tenderness can make daily life difficult. And it isn’t just the affected joint that’s impacted by joint dysfunction.
A malfunctioning or non-functioning joint has negative implications for your long-term health, and can impact parts of your body a long way away from the joint in question.
If your shoulder joint isn’t working, you might hold your arm or back differently, resulting in muscle strains, back pain, or neck pain. If you adjust your gait to compensate for dysfunctional lower-body joints, that can create pain and alignment problems as well.
It’s also often the case that with reduced joint function comes reduced activity. When you’re frequently in joint pain, and when getting around isn’t as easy as it could be, you may be less likely to go out for exercise, or even to head out on outings with friends and family. Becoming more sedentary is harmful for your long-term health, and can lead to obesity, heart disease, and other serious health problems.
At Performance Pain & Sports Medicine, our providers can help you better understand the whole-body impacts of your joint problems. We can also assist you in putting together a treatment plan to restore your damaged joint and your quality of life.
Our providers offer a variety of therapies and techniques to improve joint function. Your provider lets you know if you would benefit the most from physical therapy, injection treatment, medication management, or surgical treatment, based on extensive training and years of experience treating the whole person.
Because we focus on your whole-body health, we look at more than just the joint that’s the source of your health problems. Whole-body adjusting treats all of you, for the best pain relief and physical restoration results possible.
To learn more, contact the Performance Pain & Sports Medicine office most convenient to you today. Schedule your consultation appointment online or over the phone now.
