Joint pain has nothing to do with taking calcium. A lack of calcium is what causes bone loss.
Joint pain comes from worn cartilage, from fluid building up in the joint, from inflammation, or from inflammation of the capsule and the fluid around the joint.
Bone loss is the thing that needs calcium replacement — and usually bone loss does not cause pain until you break something. Taking calcium carelessly can also cause stones to form.
Cold weather does not damage the knee joint. When it turns cold the muscles tighten, the blood vessels tighten, and the fluid in the joint gets thicker, so the joint feels slightly stiff and becomes more sensitive to pain.
People who hurt when the weather turns cold already had something going on inside the joint to begin with.
Pain at night is a sign worth paying more attention to. Inflammatory conditions and gout are the ones that hurt a lot at night.
Osteoarthritis is the opposite: it hurts when you move around a lot, and it eases off when you rest.
If the joint pain is severe and comes with fever and with losing weight, go and get examined right away.
That is the classic picture of an acute gout attack: swelling, heat, redness and pain, coming on suddenly with no injury involved.
A joint infection can look exactly the same, though. So if there is no way in for bacteria and there is no fever, we lean towards gout — and you should still go and get examined right away.
Most of the time nothing is wrong with it.
If it does not come with pain, does not come with swelling, does not come with inflammation, then it is normal and harmless. If it does come with those things, that is when you need an exam.
Most of the time it is the kneecap not gliding correctly in its groove, or the cartilage surface has taken a mild injury.
It does not mean the same thing as osteoarthritis.
It depends on the knee. With pain and osteoarthritis, if you just lie still in one place the thigh muscle wastes away more and more, and then it hurts more, gets worse, and the leg gets weaker.
Walking well means walking on flat ground, in cushioned shoes, over gentle distances, listening to your own body.
The bad movements are going up and down stairs, climbing slopes, and squatting down.
Not straight away. There are three markers: keep an eye on pain, on swelling of the knee, and on whether the knee gives way. If one of those three is there, then you go and get examined.
The answer is no. The shoulder is a very particular joint.
If the shoulder is given total rest while it is in an inflamed phase, it very easily becomes stiff and frozen.
Resting the right way, and exercising within the range of motion you have — that is what exercising properly means.
That is a restricted movement — the inward rotation of the shoulder joint.
It usually turns up in two conditions: inflammation around the shoulder joint, or an injury to the rotator cuff tendons.
You can check it yourself at home by reaching your arms around behind your back and seeing which hand sits lower.
It is not from degeneration. Most of the time it is from the wrong posture — your neck muscles hold that posture all day long.
Your head only has to move forward two or three centimetres and your neck is already carrying twice the load.
So the treatment is very simple: raise the computer up to around eye level, and every thirty to forty-five minutes move around gently once.
If the neck cracks without any pain and without any numbness at all, that is gas bubbles inside the joint capsule, or tendons and ligaments sliding over the bony ridges. That sound is entirely harmless.
It is only when it comes with pain, with numbness, or with weakness in the arm that you need to go and get examined — and absolutely do not crack your own neck just to hear the sound.
Most of the time, no. In young people, neck and shoulder pain is from muscle strain and from posture.
Genuine degeneration in the neck usually comes with pain that spreads — numbness running down into the shoulder blade and down the arm.
Seeing the word “degeneration” on a film at thirty or forty years old is an ordinary thing, but it is not certain that it is the cause of the pain.
That is a very typical symptom of carpal tunnel syndrome.
Shaking it brings the blood back, so the numbness eases. If shaking it makes things better, that is a very strong and very typical clue.
No. Most numbness in the hand is from a compressed nerve — it can be the median nerve compressed right at the wrist, or compression at the nerve root in the neck.
It has nothing to do with lacking calcium. Lacking calcium leads to muscle cramping and to bone loss — the mechanisms are entirely different.
And if you take calcium outside of a proper indication, and keep taking it for a long time, it can even do harm.
Most of the time that is a later stage of carpal tunnel syndrome: after a long time the muscle at the base of the thumb wastes away and weakens, and that makes your grip weak.
If it has got to the point of dropping what you are holding, dropping objects, then it is already an advanced stage.
It is a real condition — trigger finger. The flexor tendon becomes inflamed and thickened, and it catches at the A1 pulley.
You have been asleep all night, and when you wake up in the morning it is stuck.
That is plantar fasciitis.
At night while you sleep the plantar fascia gets to rest and it shortens. In the morning you stand up suddenly and the plantar fascia stretches out.
After that, once you have walked around ten or twenty steps, it eases off gradually. That is the typical symptom of plantar fasciitis.
A heel spur is a consequence, it is not the cause. It is plantar fasciitis over a long time that forms the spur.
So it is not the spur digging into flesh and causing the pain.
Which means if you only deal with the spur and do not deal with the plantar fasciitis, it still hurts just the same.
Not everybody needs one. That is exactly why there has to be a clinical examination before any imaging is ordered.
An X-ray only shows bone. If we suspect that the person does not have a bone injury but a soft-tissue injury — tendon, ligament, cartilage — then we will order an MRI or an ultrasound.
When you come in for a musculoskeletal exam, you need to bring your old films, your old prescriptions and your old medical records with you.
The second thing is to wear clothes that make it easy to uncover the area that needs examining.
The third thing is to remember your own history: what the pain is like, how long it has been going on, which position makes it ease off and which position makes it worse.