How to live with osteoarthritis and our daily physical activity

The big difference is that while arthritis can subside and be treated with medication, osteoarthritis is a chronic degenerative disease with no cure. No cure does not mean nothing can be done. However, if you suffer from it, there is a very complex vicious circle to manage, both on a medical and personal level. Recommendations regarding physical activity are sometimes contradictory.

Is exercise good or bad for osteoarthritis?

The first essential step is for us to understand what a joint is. The joints They are the areas where two or more bones are found, most of them are mobile and their structure (bone, muscles, synovial membrane, cartilage and ligaments) allows us to support weight and articulate, pardon the redundancy, our movements. When one of its elements fails, it will lead to more or less serious symptoms that may require anything from simply resting for a week to surgical intervention (putting in a prosthesis or reconstructing a torn ligament, for example).

The degeneration of the cartilage typical of osteoarthritis exposes the bones to greater wear than they otherwise have. In fact, the final outcome of the most serious cases of osteoarthritis ends in the replacement of the damaged structure with a prosthesis. Although it is more than proven that cartilage does not regenerate, we become obsessed with it partly because commercial solutions to this problem fit more into our way of thinking, which is none other than “tell me what pill I take for this.” and this is where the promises of magical supplements appear whose real ability to influence the problem is quite little.

Our muscles play a fundamental role in the health of our joints, it is something that any doctor or physiotherapist can corroborate. He protects her. Balances forces. Gives stability. Therefore, a healthy and strong muscle protects and prolongs the life of your joint, which is the one that is suffering from osteoarthritis. If due to osteoarthritis you stop exercising, your muscles will notice it, the joint is more exposed, we leave it alone in the face of danger so to speak, and it is more than likely that you will end up overweight, something that feeds back into the problem, especially in our train. lower.

In addition to gaining weight, if we abandon exercise blaming our osteoarthritis, sarcopenia will also advance, which is much more dangerous because it does not hurt, it does not show its face until it is too late. We start a dangerous vicious circle: I have osteoarthritis, it hurts, I exercise less, I gain weight, the osteoarthritis continues to hurt and even gets worse, less movement, the sarcopenia accelerates, the osteoarthritis continues its course, before it hurt me when doing exercise, now just by getting up from the couch. The need for a prosthesis ends up arriving, with a longer than usual rehabilitation because there is no muscle health… severe sarcopenia along with other altered health indicators. Bad, very bad.

What exercises and with what dose?

Although moderation is good advice, it can lead very fearful people to not reach the minimum effective dose. It is always advisable that you put yourself in the hands of a qualified professional who, when we talk about exercise, may not be the doctor but a specialist. However, here are some general tips:

Recognize pain as an indicator that you are crossing some ‘red line’. This is very easy to understand, but how do we know when we are crossing our limit? Here seniority is a degree, learn from your feelings and what you have done. Try to establish cause – effect based on your experience. Without crazy things but without more fears than necessary.

Don’t mask the pain with pain relievers. You would lose the ability to assess the level of discomfort you are suffering.

Do not have prohibited exercises just because. It is not the doctor’s mission (sometimes unfortunately) to know all the exercises that exist to strengthen a muscle group. There is no single squat, for example, and you can

Treatments and/or remedies

As we said at the beginning, osteoarthritis is degenerative and has no cure; it can be slowed down, but not reversed. That does not mean that we have to resign ourselves, these are the options that are most commonly considered to alleviate the inconvenience and limitations caused by it:

From a healing point of view, expect almost nothing. The value of this type of device is to enable the work of some localized muscle areas that have lost volume because the pain prevents us from exercising them properly. It is an extra help that helps improve our lean mass or rehabilitate us a little faster and little else.

Products such as wrist guards, elbow pads or knee pads… By giving extra support to the joint they can provide a small relief, but that’s all. Of course they don’t cure. They won’t hurt you either, but with this type of products you run the risk of masking the problem and not providing a solution. There are many physios who recommend not using them.

On the one hand we would have supplements such as collagen, glucosamine and chondroitin, which are sold as a magical remedy for joint health. This promise is based on the fact that all of these substances are found in cartilage, so giving the body an ‘extra’ of them contributes to its health. Its scope is limited and there are many who argue that it is due to the placebo effect. If they work for someone, go ahead, they won’t do any harm. On the other hand, we would have natural anti-inflammatories such as arnica, curcumin or ginger which, although much healthier than abusing ibuprofen, do not have such a notable effect either.

Hyaluronic acid has long been famous in numerous beauty treatments to achieve a smoother complexion. In the case of osteoarthritis, it is used in the joints to minimize friction thanks to the extra lubrication it provides. Although it is an outpatient treatment, it does not have the slightest complications and its effect is almost immediate, but it must be taken into account that it is not curative and that it loses effectiveness over time.

PRP is a concentrated serum extracted from one of the types of cells in our blood; the platelets. When obtained from our own blood, the risk of rejection or adverse reaction is practically non-existent. Within platelets there are up to ten types of growth factors that come to repair damaged tissues when we have some type of injury, so with a PRP infiltration we seek this natural repair of our tissues. This sounds like regeneration, but it is worth insisting that it is not exactly like that. This treatment is increasingly used and there is beginning to be enough evidence to take it into account. Now, warning: it is an expensive treatment that is not usually covered by insurance, its effect is not immediate and there are people who, having tried it, have not noticed improvement.

Conclusions

Osteoarthritis is a problem that, at a certain point, we can consider as part of a natural process of wear and tear of our cartilage that ends up affecting the bone. Its progression or appearance can be accelerated by trauma or by a pattern of movement repeated constantly and prolonged over time. Although it is not hereditary, there may be a certain genetic predisposition to suffer from it. Adequate exercise, especially that which contributes to strengthening the muscles that help balance the tension of the joint that suffers from osteoarthritis, is not only beneficial but necessary to extend its life and functionality.

When choosing the best source of information regarding doses and technical options that you should use to be able to exercise without worsening your osteoarthritis, we must understand that the doctor’s knowledge regarding physical activity has a limit, that is what physiotherapists and doctors are for. coaches. In parallel with any recommendation, we must be clear about the situation and history of each patient, something that will largely determine the limits of what they can or cannot do.