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.