Physical Therapy

Hip Labrum Surgery Complications: Making the Hip Unstable…

This week while practicing down in Grand Cayman I evaluated a professional ballerina from Germany who regrettably is having issues with recovery due to hip labrum surgery complications. In her case, she was diagnosed with CAM and pincer impingement and since having these bone spurs removed has never been able to get back to high level…read more

Hip Impingement Causes: Is Instability the Culprit?

What is Hip FAI?  Are there Hip Impingement causes that I can address, or is FAI inevitable? These are common questions patients ask themselves. The answer may be that your hip has been unstable for many years and those bone spurs that your surgeon wants to whack out may be all that’s protecting your hip joint!…read more

New Treatment for Neck Pain: Platelet Lysate and Heidi’s Journey

At our annual Regenexx network provider conference in Denver this past week, a network physician who is more focused on interventional spine came up and thanked me for introducing him to a new treatment for neck pain – platelet lysate. This one change had revolutionized his practice as he found it much more effective than…read more

Spinal Stenosis Options: PT as Effective as Surgery

What are your spinal stenosis options? Should you have surgery? This has been a rough 5-10 years for surgeons who operate on the joints and the spine. Study after study comparing common surgeries to either placebo surgery (i.e. a fake operation) or physical therapy continues to show that many procedures don’t work. The most recent victim this week…read more

How to Recover from Neck Pain? A Little Muscle Holds the Key…

How to recover from neck pain? The status of a little stabilizing muscle in your neck may determine if you recover quickly or have long term chronic pain. This little muscle can also be easily seen on an MRI, but the likelihood that the radiologist reading your report knows to take a look at and…read more

Hip Impingement Exercises: Can You Fix It with Therapy and Avoid Surgery?

Can hip impingement exercises help avoid surgery? The diagnosis of hip impingement that leads to surgery has been all the rage lately, despite research showing that in some cases, what’s diagnosed as “impingement” may actually be protecting rather than harming the joint. What we don’t know is how simple changes in posture can impact FAI…read more

Does Meniscus Surgery Work? A Quartet of Studies Says It’s No Better than Fake Surgery or PT

Few patients ask the obvious question about knee meniscus surgery: Does meniscus surgery work? The answer, after many different high quality studies is that it definitely doesn’t work. Let me explain. The first major paper on the efficacy of arthroscopic knee surgery was published more than a decade ago in 2002. It compared “arthroscopic debridement”…read more

Knee Nerve Pain? More Evidence that the Pain of Arthritis is Caused by Nerves

Is there such a thing as knee nerve pain? Your joint pain due to arthritis is caused by lost cartilage, right? Likely wrong. There’s been a mounting body of evidence that arthritis itself doesn’t cause pain, and in fact the pain of arthritis (and perhaps arthritis itself in some cases), is caused by nerves. The…read more