Jake: Hey, I’m Jake of Body by Jake with your health and wellness tip of the day. And wow, Dr. Art Mollen is here and we’ve got some answers to your great questions. Dr. Art, good to see you. Good to see you. You did a couple of segments about sports injuries, and I want to talk today about hips and knees.
Dr. Art: Yes, I treat a lot of those. A lot of times people will be exercising and you know, suddenly they get pain in their hip, and they’ll think that it’s starting to radiate down their leg and even getting some numbness or something.
So if you think that it’s coming from your hip, of course, you want to get an x-ray and make sure it’s not arthritis or you don’t need a hip replacement depending upon your age. So if you’re starting to get hip pain and you really don’t know what it is, you know, they often refer to it as iliotibial band syndrome.
That’s something that a lot of runners will get and it goes down into their knee and everything like that. I find that a lot of times that hip pain is actually coming from the low back. So it’s coming from a disc that’s actually bulging in the low back or even herniated and that can cause numbness and pain radiating down your leg and even into your foot.
Jake: How do we fix that? How do we help that?
Dr. Art: So first of all, you want to do some simple stretching exercises. You want to again do some strengthening exercises for your low back and also for your abdominal muscles. And you can start out by taking say, ibuprofen over the counter.
But before you do anything, you want to go to your doctor, you want to make sure that you don’t have severe arthritis in your hip or anything like that.
Don’t jump into having a hip replacement because I find a lot of times people think “well, I have this hip pain,” you know, they’ll see a doctor and the doctor says, “well, you probably need a hip replacement.” I don’t like “probably need,” you know. I want to know that it’s definitively “you have severe arthritis and you need that.” So stay away from surgery if you can.
Jake: Let’s talk about feet for a minute. A lot of people have, you know foot problems.
Dr. Art: Yeah, you know an interesting thing about foot problems and again you may I have flat feet, you know, you may have your arches basically have collapsed.
You can see a podiatrist, you have a foot doctor and you have arch supports. There are customized arch supports. They go into your shoes and they change the biomechanics of how you actually land. So your weight is evenly distributed.
But a lot of times when people have foot pain Jake, I find that it’s actually coming from the low back and they don’t address the low back and they just focus on their foot.
Always check with a doctor before doing any kind of exercise. But, also, if you’re feeling some pain, don’t try to self-medicate and do stretching exercises for your feet. You want to make sure that you don’t pull your Achilles tendon.
I find that a lot of people, you know, say they haven’t exercised in a long time they go and they play tennis they wind up with a ruptured Achilles tendon. Stretch before you exercise.
Jake: As always, well said Dr. Art!
