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@projfan

Yup. The classic (which bought me years) is weight loss.

I bought several years with gait modification -- my physical therapist basically worked on torque in the knees and hips so my weight was more centered as I moved. This takes a lot of dedication, because it took almost a year before my new gait became instinctive, and for the first couple of months, I needed a hip brace to nudge the hip into alignment over the knee. You want a PT practice that has experience with this -- mine did a lot of work with dancers.

The next thing I intend to ask my ortho specialist about is botox. I use botox now for migraines. She never suggested it, and it's not a first-line treatment, but it's worked in clinical trials -- not really big trials, but still, what the heck, right?

If you are prepared to get really fringy, there's stuff like stem cell injections, which I'm personally convinced are mostly expensive placebo effect (because we really don't understand how stem cells work well enough to use them insightfully), but placebo can be really powerful for pain.

I've tried biofeedback for migraine pain -- there is nothing special about the migraine aspects of this, since biofeedback is actually going after your central nervous system's perception of pain. Acupuncture really works for some people (not everyone) on pain of any sort, and this includes arthritis pain. You need to give both of these the kind of time you would give to PT before deciding if they are working -- perhaps several months of at least once a week?

I've found it helpful to realize that bone-on-bone (which I have) and pain are actually badly correlated. This means that the actual pain is being driven by aspects of our anatomy (including damage within the bone) that cannot be seen on an x-ray. Therefore, it's about going after the pain as pain.

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Replies to "Yup. The classic (which bought me years) is weight loss. I bought several years with gait..."

Thank you! Very helpful. I too was diagnosed with 'bone on bone' last summer - both hip and knee. Is there a particular name for the type of PT you had? I would like to look into it.
On another note... weight loss has been helping me too (long way to go but I'm doing it!)