What An Acupuncturist Does

If you’re looking to get needles poked into your skin, there are several things you should know about an acupuncturist. Acupuncture has been practiced in the United States since the 1970s, and though it originated in China more than 5,000 years ago, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that it became popular in the West. Today, there are thousands of practicing acupuncturists throughout the world. But what does an acupuncturist Columbia, MD actually do? What makes an acupuncturist so special? What can they treat? And how can they help you personally according to our friends at Patapsco Integrative Medicine & Rehab?

The Healing Power of Needles

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been around for centuries and is based on the belief that our health is determined by the flow of energy, or qi, in our bodies. Acupuncture is one of the main tools used in TCM to restore balance and promote healing. Needles are inserted at various points along the body’s meridians — the pathways through which qi flows — to stimulate the release of endorphins, a natural pain reliever. A session usually lasts about 45 minutes, during which time patients recline fully clothed on a table and listen to calming music as they’re being treated. Afterward, many people report feeling relaxed and refreshed. Some studies have shown acupuncture can help alleviate chronic pain from conditions like arthritis and back problems; relieve nausea from chemotherapy; and treat anxiety disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, migraines, sleep disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, addiction withdrawal symptoms; increase fertility rates; relieve menopausal symptoms like hot flashes; alleviate labor pains; and speed recovery after surgery.

The Benefits of Acupuncture

Acupuncture is a form of traditional Chinese medicine that has been used for centuries to treat a variety of ailments. Today, acupuncture is commonly used to relieve pain, reduce stress, and improve overall well-being. It also may be helpful in treating other medical conditions such as depression, migraines, allergies, fertility issues, digestive problems, menopause symptoms and more. In fact, many people have found relief from chronic pain after only one treatment!

The Science Behind It All

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is based on the belief that good health is achieved by maintaining balance and harmony within the body. According to TCM, our bodies are composed of two opposing forces: yin and yang. Yin represents all that is negative, dark, and feminine, while yang represents all that is positive, light, and masculine. Health is achieved when these two forces are in balance. However, any disruption of this balance can lead to illness. That’s where acupuncture comes in. Acupuncture was developed as a way to help maintain this natural balance through specific stimulation of points along the body’s meridians — the channels that carry life-giving energy from one part of the body to another. In addition to relieving pain, other benefits include helping with headaches, stress, sleep problems, fatigue and so much more. Acupuncture treatment typically begins with a detailed intake interview to determine your individual needs followed by treatments consisting of needles placed at specific acupoints on your skin.

Contact an acupuncturist today to schedule an appointment to see how they can help you overcome your aches and pains.

What Is Cosmetic Dentistry?

Cosmetic dentistry helps kids and adults alike properly maintain the health, appearance, and function of their teeth. A common misconception holds that cosmetic dentistry is comprised of procedures that are embraced for the sake of vanity and are not necessary. This perception of cosmetic dentistry isn’t grounded in reality. While some cosmetic dental procedures are offered “simply” so that individuals can achieve greater confidence in their smiles, anyone who has ever dealt with the social and emotional consequences of feeling insecure about their smile can attest that a confident smile can be a genuinely necessary asset to one’s wellbeing.

Additionally, cosmetic dental procedures are often performed on injury victims and those who were born with dental imperfections that affect the functioning of their mouths. Finally, anyone can benefit from certain cosmetic procedures designed specifically to ensure that teeth remain healthy and functional for a lifetime.

Common Cosmetic Dental Procedures

As an experienced dentist – including those who practice at TruGlo Modern Dentistry – can confirm, there are a variety of cosmetic dental procedures available, designed to meet a wide variety of patient needs. Some of the most common include:

Teeth whitening: When staining, injury, or genetic imperfections leave teeth dull or discolored, professional whitening efforts can result in lasting impacts on affected teeth.

Bonding: Dental bonding addresses chips, decay, and discoloration in teeth. Bonding materials are resin-based and are colored to match the natural shade of a patient’s teeth so that the bonding efforts appear natural.

Clear braces: Especially when patients in need of braces are adults or are younger people who spend a great deal of time in front of a camera, the look of traditional braces simply don’t meet everyone’s needs. By applying clear braces, older patients and younger patients with unique needs can achieve the results that braces afford without the obvious cosmetic challenges that can accompany wearing braces under certain circumstances

Porcelain veneers: Dental veneers adhere to the front of a tooth to compensate for chipping, decay, wear, and discoloration. They can also be used simply to ensure that teeth remain stronger and healthier for longer. Porcelain veneers are generally preferable to resin-based veneers, simply because they reflect light more naturally and do not stain as easily.

Inlays and Onlays: Inlays and onlays are placed on the peaks and valleys of teeth that are in need of repair beyond fillings but do not require such extensive treatment as afforded by dental crowns.

Joint Pain: Hot and Cold Therapy

If you suffer from chronic knee pain or if you’ve recently sustained trauma to the knee resulting in acute knee pain, connect with a knowledgeable Phoenixville, PA knee pain doctor at Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania. While not all knee pain can be successfully mitigated and managed without surgical intervention, our specialist team will do our utmost to help you avoid surgery if doing so is a priority for you. Similarly, if you hope to minimize or eliminate your dependence upon pain medication to manage your knee pain, we can help you achieve that goal as well.

Personalizing Your Treatment Plan

At Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania, we treat each client’s needs uniquely. We refuse to take cookie-cutter approaches to patient care in the interests of getting more patients through our doors at a faster rate. In order to personalize your treatment plan, we’ll need to thoroughly evaluate your patient history, assess your current symptoms and health status, ask you about your needs, goals, and priorities, and assess which treatment options may benefit you to the greatest possible extent.

Not every treatment option works in the same way for each knee pain patient. As a result, we may need to tweak your treatment plan over time, depending upon the results that you want and the effects that you are feeling after engaging in different therapy types. Some knee pain patients respond positively to a single form of treatment. For example, many of our patients find that they need no other intervention after their pain has been alleviated by knee injections. However, as patients are all different and maintaining one’s knee health is a priority for the rest of a patient’s life, it is not generally a good idea to rely on a single therapy approach alone. Complementing more intensive therapies such as knee injections with supplemental therapies can be particularly helpful. For example, hot and cold therapy can help in both preventative and reactive ways.

Why Hot and Cold Therapy?

The body responds profoundly two changes in temperature. Applying temperature two an aching part of the body can help to alleviate pain, reduce inflammation, stimulate blood flow, improve circulation, relax muscles, reduce stiffness, and improve one’s sense of well-being. Generally speaking, heat is relaxing, and cold is numbing. As a result, heat tends to help when muscles surrounding the knee are tense or overworked. By contrast, cold helps to reduce inflammation when a knee has become swollen and painful.

It is important to remember not to apply hot or cold therapy that is too extreme in temperature. You do not want to burn yourself from heat or burn yourself from cold. You will also want to limit the duration of these therapies. A good rule of thumb is that you should never apply heat or cold to your knee for longer than 20 minutes at a time. Connect with Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania today to learn more about primary and supplemental therapies for knee pain.

Trying to Avoid Knee Replacement Surgery?

If you’re suffering from acute or chronic knee pain and you’d like to avoid knee replacement surgery, it may benefit you to speak with an experienced Phoenixville, PA knee pain doctor at Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania. Surgery may be required to minimize or eliminate patient pain under certain circumstances. However, you may be able to avoid surgery if your osteoarthritis or other knee condition is not so advanced or traumatic that surgery has become an absolute necessity.

Non-Surgical Knee Pain Mitigation Techniques

If you are trying to avoid knee replacement surgery, there are many different therapies and techniques that you could potentially benefit from. It is important to understand that you do not necessarily need to pick just one therapy or technique when trying to avoid knee replacement surgery. Many patients have found that combining various approaches produces the best results. With that said, be wary of assuming that the combination of therapies and techniques that has worked for someone else will work in that same way for you. Instead, keep an open mind so that you can benefit from trying out multiple approaches in order to better determine what works for you uniquely.

For example, the experienced team at Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania may recommend that you schedule one or more knee injections to speed your healing and recovery. Unlike many providers, we never perform blind injections. We use a specialized tool to ensure that the injection is made exactly at the site where it will produce the best results. No provider can guarantee that an injection will provide the desired results of the patient. However, by ensuring that an injection is given exactly where it needs to be given to have the maximum possible potential to do good, we give our patients the best possible shot at achieving relief. Our knee injections are not synthetic, but use the body’s own material to promote healing and recovery. This approach better ensures that a patient will not reject an injection and will instead benefit from it to the maximum amount possible under the circumstances.

Knee injections can help patients to feel relief instantly. However, most patients do benefit from integrating additional knee pain management mitigation techniques into their care plan. For example, both chronic pain patients and acute pain patients can benefit from physical therapy, medications, regular stretching, and pressure techniques such as massage, and some patients benefit from lifestyle changes that promote weight loss. Again, not every patient responds to the same techniques and treatments in the same way. As a result, it is important to receive a personalized care treatment plan after consulting with a physician who has extensive experience treating knee pain patients. Once you are equipped with the knowledge of what treatments may work for you, you can start your journey toward mitigating your pain and improving your overall knee and joint health.

Knee Injections – The Basics

If you suffer from osteoarthritis or other knee challenges that impact your quality of life, it may be time to speak with an experienced Phoenixville, PA knee pain doctor at Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania about whether knee injection therapy could potentially help you recover faster and more completely.

The concept of knee injections is off-putting to many people at first. After all, the idea of having a large needle shoved somewhere near your painful knee (when you may be feeling hesitant to even let a blanket touch your knee because your tissue has become so sensitive) isn’t pleasant. However, the potential benefits of knee injection therapies are so profound for some patients that they far outweigh the potential drawbacks associated with these procedures.

Types of Knee Injections

Not all knee injections work for every patient and not all knee injections work in the same ways. As a result it is important to be honest and to give a complete accounting of both your medical history and symptoms when you meet with the experienced team at Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania. If you don’t, we won’t be able to objectively recommend the kind of knee injection treatment that may benefit you most completely.

Not so long ago, the primary kinds of knee injections used by knee pain specialists involved synthetic steroids. Alternatively, doctors would aspirate fluid from the knee as opposed to injecting the knee with proactive substances. Both of these procedures are still used by some physicians under certain circumstances and can produce positive results.

However, the standard of care for many osteoarthritis and other chronic pain patients now involves injections of substances that occur naturally in the body. For example, platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections are now often used to benefit knee pain patients, partially because the body rarely reacts to substances that it has produced naturally.

What to Expect

At the Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania, we never perform blind injections. It has been estimated that roughly 40 percent of knee injection procedures that are performed blind do not produce any results. Instead of going in blind, we utilize a fluoroscope to guide the injection directly to where it needs to be placed for maximum effect.

We take great pride in the fact that this non-surgical knee pain treatment approach often minimizes patient pain as it promotes healing within minutes of the injection procedure. Our process has been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, so patients can trust that they are embracing a therapy that is neither experimental nor unproven to assist with achieving the results that knee pain patients desire. As an added bonus, this procedure does not require any recovery time. As a result, you can leave our office to resume your daily activities without having to take any time off of work or away from engagements that are important to you. If you suffer from chronic or acute knee pain, connect with our office to determine whether knee injections could benefit your circumstances.

Yoga for Knee Pain… Really?

If you are suffering from chronic or acute knee pain, there are many different methods that the Phoenixville, PA knee pain doctor team at Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania may recommend to you in order to eliminate your pain or manage your pain to the fullest extent possible under the circumstances. Some of these methods may involve lifestyle choices, such as walking more frequently and losing weight. However, most patients who suffer from knee pain have already done everything that they can to adjust their lives to minimize the amount of pain that they feel. As a result, most of our recommendations tend to be things that patients haven’t already likely tried to integrate into their daily lives.

For example, we may recommend that a patient receive knee injections designed to improve knee mobility and function, while reducing inflammation and minimizing pain. This suggestion works in two ways. First, the injection itself can help to alleviate or even eliminate pain. Second, decreased pain, improved mobility, and improved function can allow a patient to lead a more active lifestyle, which can potentially improve knee pain under certain circumstances as well.

Similarly, the experienced team at Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania may recommend that a chronic or acute knee patient benefit from physical therapy sessions, fascial release techniques, and other motion or pressure-based treatments. These treatments, like knee injections, can benefit knee health directly and can result in supplemental benefits that may promote knee health over the long-term. Physical therapy exercises may involve yoga poses.

How Yoga Poses and Flows Can Help Knee Pain

When most people think about yoga and knees at the same time, they think about how uncomfortable it can be to engage in yoga poses that require the participant to bend in certain ways or to place pressure directly on the knees. Know that we would never recommend yoga poses as a form of physical therapy that would endanger a patient’s joint health or exacerbate preexisting knee, leg, hip, or other health conditions.

What many people do not realize, is that if approached in a certain way, a regular yoga practice can help to improve knee health and minimize knee pain. Similarly, if a patient is uninterested in participating in a regular yoga practice, specific yoga poses and flows can benefit knee health and minimize knee pain even when approached outside of a broader practice.

If this idea seems strange or counterintuitive to you, take a few minutes to hop on YouTube and search for yoga videos that focus on the knees. You may be surprised to learn how much certain yoga approaches can benefit mobility, flexibility, and the ability of the body to relax. Holding tension around the knees or in the hips can significantly impact knee health and knee pain. By integrating yoga positions into a physical therapy context in the right ways, the Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania can help you to achieve the results you desire as part of a broader knee management plan.

What Causes Knee Pain?

If you are experiencing acute pain, chronic pain, or chronic discomfort in one or both of your knees, consider connecting with a knowledgeable Collegeville, PA knee pain doctor at Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania. Depending upon what is causing your pain, the severity of your pain, how long your pain has been plaguing you, and a host of other factors, we may be able to craft a treatment plan that could mitigate – or even eliminate – your pain.

It is important to understand that while no medical provider can guarantee the outcome of a treatment plan, working with an experienced knee pain specialist can better help to ensure that your quality of life is improved to the fullest possible extent under the circumstances. Knee pain can be difficult to live with. If knee pain is severe enough, it can be debilitating. Seeking treatment for your knee pain can potentially help you to sleep better, to become more active, and to generally have and more positive quality of life. Therefore, even though it can be difficult to get your hopes up with no guarantee of a result, it is important to know that you have done everything that you could to better ensure that if your knee pain is treatable that you have sought the assistance necessary to achieve the maximum favorable result possible under the circumstances.

Common Knee Pain Causes

Perhaps the most common cause of knee pain that we treat at Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania is advancing age. No part of the body is immune from the passage of time. Unfortunately, wear and tear on joints tends to be a painful process that ultimately results and decreased mobility, decreased function, and an at least somewhat impaired quality of life. It has been estimated repeatedly but as many as 100 million Americans suffer from chronic knee pain. It is safe to say but the majority of sufferers experienced knee pain, at least to some degree, as a result of the aging process.

Other common sources of knee pain include excessive weight, trauma, chronic health conditions such as rheumatological inflammation, athletic injuries, and overuse injuries. Each of these causes needs to be treated in slightly different ways, as it is not effective to treat an athlete who has torn something in their knee with the same approaches as one would treat a sedentary individual in their 80s who suffers from chronic osteoarthritis.

Can Knee Pain Be Treated Effectively?

Most of the time, knee pain can be effectively mitigated, managed, and may even be eliminated if proper treatments are administered by those who know what they’re doing. For example, our practice has witnessed excellent results when certain knee pain patients have been administered knee injections. Although we cannot guarantee that our approaches will eliminate your knee pain, the dedicated team at Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania will do our utmost to ensure the most favorable treatment outcomes possible under the unique circumstances that you’re facing. 

Get to Know Your Knees

If you’re struggling as a result of knee pain, it may benefit you to speak with a Pottstown, PA knee surgeon that locals trust. By scheduling a consultation with Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania, you can voice your concerns, ask questions, and learn about your treatment options.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to prepare for consultations in order to make the most of your valuable time, you may want to familiarize yourself with some of the basic vocabulary and concepts related to your knees. That way, when we are explaining our recommendations and how we reached those specific recommendations, you’ll be placed in an excellent position to ask informed questions about your anatomy and how it might be affected by various treatment options available to you.  

Knee Anatomy

The knee is a hinge joint located between some of the longest bones in the human body. The knee is made up of the bones that meet to form your knee, ligaments, tendons, and cartilage. The complex anatomy of the human knee helps to explain why knees get injured so often. There are, quite simply, so many things that can go wrong that can affect the health, mobility, and function of the knee joint. Bones break, ligaments tear, elements dislocate… by understanding how all of these elements work together for your benefit, you can help to understand why certain treatment options may or may not effectively treat whatever is going on with your knee in particular.

There are four bones that meet to form the knee joint. Your patella is your kneecap. Your femur runs upward to help form your thigh. Your tibia and fibula run downward to help form your shin. When these bones fracture, dislocate, or chip, the stress can spell trouble for your knee. Similarly, your knee can suffer when the ligaments that attach your bones to each other tear or otherwise become compromised.

Ligament and tendon tears are notoriously painful. The team at Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania regularly helps patients to manage ligament and tendon issues in order to improve flexibility, mobility and function. Whereas ligaments attach bones to one another, tendons attach muscle to bone.

Finally, your knee relies on cartilage to serve as shock absorbers within the knee joint and allow it to glide smoothly. When cartilage tears or breaks down, the integrity of the knee joint and its functionality can be compromised. The team at Premier Osteoarthritis Centers of Pennsylvania has discovered that cartilage and/or bone degeneration pain and inflammation can often be treated effectively through the use of knee injections. While no provider can guarantee the result of a specific treatment, we have witnessed that many patients who suffer from osteoarthritis, other inflammatory conditions, and degeneration of tissue due to advancing age, trauma, or defect, often see great results with this particular therapy. Connect with our team today to learn more and to discuss your options to manage your knee pain.