You’re hobbled by a musculoskeletal issue, perhaps in your knee or shoulder, and you want the ability to move again without pain. You’ve tried conservative treatments that have come up short in relieving your chronic pain. It might be time to consider arthroscopy.
As orthopedic specialists, the team here at The Woodlands Sports Medicine Centre appreciates the invaluable role that arthroscopy can play in restoring pain-free function to your joints. Each year in the United States, approximately 1.77 million arthroscopic procedures are performed, allowing people to break free from their chronic pain.
In the following, we review six benefits of arthroscopy for your chronic pain.
Arthroscopy is a technique in which we use a small camera and a light that we thread through a tube to give us a clear, high-definition view of the inner structures of your joint. Before this technique was invented, surgeons had to open the area up to gain visual and manual access, which caused a good deal of collateral tissue damage.
With arthroscopy, we’re not only able to visualize your joint via the camera, but we also use specialized instruments that translate the movements of our hands to perform repairs and reconstruction.
As a result, you benefit from much smaller incisions and minimal damage to surrounding tissues.
Since we’re able to minimize collateral tissue damage with arthroscopy, your recovery time is much shorter than it would be with open surgery. The small incisions heal faster, and there’s less risk of infection.
Another benefit of arthroscopy is that we can keep surface scarring to a minimum.
If you’re turning to arthroscopy to relieve chronic pain, the last thing you want is to go through more pain. Since we only make small incisions, we can reduce your discomfort considerably over traditional surgical techniques.
If you’ve been struggling with joint pain for some time, the odds are good that we’ve turned to advanced imaging to try to identify the source of your pain. While X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans provide excellent information, joints are complex, and problems can remain hidden.
With arthroscopy, we’re able to take a firsthand look inside your joint, allowing us to pinpoint your problem with accuracy.
No matter which joint is giving you trouble, the odds are good that we can use arthroscopy to diagnose and treat the problem. To give you an idea, we routinely turn to arthroscopy for:
These conditions are some of the more common painful joint problems we can address through arthroscopy.
If you’d like to explore whether arthroscopy can put an end to your chronic pain, contact our office in Woodlands, Texas, today to schedule a consultation.
