Hip, joint, and mobility.

Joint pain gets a particular kind of shrug from the medical system once a scan shows wear. The imaging is real, the wear is real, and the advice that follows is often to modify what you do, take something for it, and come back when it is bad enough to replace.

That advice skips a step. Wear on a scan explains some of your pain. It does not explain all of it. Muscles compensating around a joint that has stopped moving well, and a nervous system that has been managing that for years, account for a share of what you feel, and those parts respond to treatment even when the joint itself does not change.

One patient here had been told by multiple orthopedic surgeons she could not run again and would live with pain until a hip replacement. She had already done a year of physical therapy. Some months into treatment she ran ten miles in Chapel Hill and reported no hip pain afterward. That is one person, and this page will not promise you her outcome. It is worth knowing that the ceiling other providers describe is sometimes lower than the real one.

Also on this list

Hip pain that arrives or worsens with the menopausal transition belongs here too, and it gets dismissed even more often than the arthritic kind. It is a musculoskeletal problem and it is treatable as one.