Florida Pain Medicine is a rotation site and teaching facility for USF Health ACGME Pain Medicine Fellowship and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Residency.
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Don’t Enter the New Year With Joint Pain

If you routinely go through your day pushing through your joint pain, it’s time to take a different approach. Using a painful joint only increases your chance of progressive joint damage. Instead of taking that risk, let the team at Florida Pain Medicine help.

As specialists in pain management, physical medicine, and rehabilitation, our experienced physicians have helped many patients overcome joint pain with comprehensive therapies that deliver immediate and long-term pain relief.

We’re getting close to the New Year, but you still have plenty of time to start a treatment regimen that will get you back into action and ready to celebrate with less joint pain. Here are a few examples of how we can get the job done.

Physical therapy and rehabilitation

Movement is essential for restoring and maintaining joint strength and mobility. However, your movement must be carefully structured to support your joint while healing the underlying problem. That’s a goal you can’t reach when you just go about your daily activities trying to live with the pain.

A customized physical therapy program strengthens the muscles around the joint, which is key because they support joint movement. Your exercise program also improves range of motion and flexibility. These all work together to relieve joint pain and restore optimal function.

If you want to return to sports, you can count on rehabilitation to correct muscle imbalances that lead to joint pain. Your program also focuses on the skills and training that are specific to your sport.

Our goal is to get you back in the game (or dancing on New Year’s Eve) at the same level as before your joint pain started.

Interventional medicine

Maybe you’re thinking that physical rehabilitation sounds great — even being able to take a walk around the block might sound great — but your joint is way too painful for exercise.

That’s where interventional medicine comes into play. Interventional treatments target the source of your pain, providing quick relief so that you can engage in physical therapy and get on the road to recovery.

These are just two examples of the many interventional treatments we offer:

Steroid injections

Steroids are powerful anti-inflammatory medications. The medication takes a few days to go to work, but once it reduces inflammation, most patients get several months of pain relief.

However, everyone metabolizes medications differently. If your steroid injection only delivers mild or short-lived relief, we can give you another injection to improve the results.

Radiofrequency ablation

With today’s advanced technology, we have instruments that work like a needle, but come equipped to deliver radiofrequency energy and perform a type of treatment called radiofrequency ablation.

With the heat from radiofrequency energy, we can create a precise wound on the nerve that’s sending pain signals from the joint to your brain. The wound blocks the nerve transmission, your brain doesn’t get the memo, and as a result, you get significant pain relief.

The best thing about radiofrequency ablation (besides pain relief), is that you get fast results and the pain relief typically lasts nine months to two years.

Regenerative medicine

Regenerative medicine doesn’t act as quickly as interventional treatments, but a treatment now will still make a difference by the New Year.

Treatments like platelet-rich plasma (PRP) and stem cell injections give you something you can’t get from other treatments: Regenerative medicine alleviates your pain by healing the damaged tissues.

Stem cells divide to create new cells. Then the new cells develop into the tissues needed to heal the damage in your joint. These cells can regenerate muscle, ligaments, tendon, and cartilage, to name just a few.

The platelets in PRP support the growth of the new cells. Platelets also accelerate healing, regulate inflammation, and stimulate new blood vessel growth.

We use real-time imaging to inject PRP and/or stem cells, placing them right at the tissues inside your joint that need to heal. They immediately start the regeneration process, but it still takes time for your body to regenerate new tissues.

If you struggle with joint pain, don’t wait a minute longer to call Florida Pain Medicine. There’s still time to get pain relief before the New Year.

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