You used to live an active and busy life, but increasing pain and inflammation in one or both of your ankles have sidelined you, and you want to find a way back.
Few things can hobble you like osteoarthritis (OA), which is a wear-and-tear form of arthritis that affects about 33 million Americans. And when it strikes the ankles, it can really limit your life.
Given that May is Arthritis Awareness Month, Aesthetic Podiatry & Sports Medicine Center’s leading foot health experts — Dr. Mariola Rivera and Dr. Lisa Shah — thought it would be a good time to review some of the innovative treatment options for ankle OA.
These options focus on healing and not just symptom management. Let’s take a look.
We want to quickly describe what we’re up against when it comes to OA, starting with the fact that there's no cure for the disease. This is problematic when you also plug in the fact that OA is often progressive.
When you have osteoarthritis, the protective cartilage inside your joints, which covers the bones for smooth gliding, begins to break down. This cartilage breakdown leads to more friction between your bones, which is what creates the pain and inflammation that are the hallmarks of OA.
The friction can also lead to bits of bone breaking off, which join the cartilage fragments to create loose bodies inside the joint that further exacerbate the issue.
There are many ways in which you can manage the symptoms of ankle OA, such as anti-inflammatory medications and ice/heat therapies, but these don’t really help the underlying problem — the breakdown of cartilage and the inflammatory environment inside the joint.
For more meaningful results that help restore pain-free function to your joint, we prefer approaches that work with your body to direct healing and regenerative resources into your ankles. To do this, we turn to:
This is an exciting regenerative therapy in which we harvest platelets from your own blood to create a concentrate that we inject into your arthritic ankles. These platelets release growth factors that call on healing resources, and they also release proteins (cytokines) that control inflammation.
So, PRP therapy can encourage healing inside your ankles at the same time as the treatment reduces pain and inflammation.
Another effective approach for ankle arthritis is MLS laser therapy, which uses two different wavelengths of laser energy to tackle pain and inflammation.
This technology not only does a great job of managing OA symptoms, it also encourages more blood flow to your ankles. This blood flow carries invaluable resources that can help your ankles to get stronger.
Rounding out our innovative ankle OA treatment options is ESWT, a treatment in which we deliver ultrasound energy into your ankles to encourage healing. These high-frequency sound waves cause the healing and regenerative resources in your body to jump into action to reduce inflammation and heal damaged tissues.
One study of using ESWT for OA concluded that, “Extracorporeal shockwave therapy could be recommended in the treatment of osteoarthritis as a noninvasive therapy with safety and effectiveness.”
As you can see, our toolkit for ankle OA is extensive, and we’re confident that we can find the right combination of treatments to get you back on your feet and moving without pain again.
To explore your options for ankle OA with one of our specialists, please contact us online or by phone at one of our offices in Purchase or White Plains, New York, to schedule a consultation.
