In the last video, we started talking about osteo arthritis. In this video, I want to cover the main treatments for osteoarthritis. Now I can really go into depth about all of these treatments, but I want to give a main overview. The first type of treatment is physical therapy. Physical Therapy really helps to strengthen the supporting muscles and take pressure off of the damaged cartilage. This can really improve the daily functions, and also the amount of pain that you're feeling.
The second type of treatment, which is the most effective and probably the hardest, is weight control. If you are overweight or somebody suffering from osteoarthritis is overweight. Losing weight is the number one way to reduce knee pain. We're not going to go too into depth about what kind of diets and how to lose weight right now, but just know that losing weight is the best way to treat osteoarthritis. Treatment number three is local injections. Now there are a few types of injections that you can get into your knee.
I will mention two of them right now. The first one is steroids. steroids suppress inflammation. And as they do this, they can reduce a lot of the pain that you might have in your knee due to inflammation. Now this is a short term response, it doesn't fix the problem. It merely shuts down some of the pain that you're having, and it might be for a few weeks after that the pain will return.
The second type of injection is the type of lubricant you use wd 40 for your car to make sure that the pistons the pistons slide smoothly in the engine. In your knee. You can also use type of lubricant to make sure that the cartilage slide smoothly one against another. This is a little bit of a controversial therapy because it's been semi proven to work and the evidence isn't very clear cut however, Wherever there are patients that really benefit from this type of therapy, the main type of lubricant that we use for injections is hyaluronic acid. The knee is the main place that we use these injections. It's been tried a little bit in the back, but it hasn't yet been proven, as well as it's worked in the knee treatment number four is painkillers.
And the most commonly used painkillers for knee pain, chronically at least is non steroidal anti inflammatory medication. This is things like ibuprofen. Now it might be good and it might help you in the short term, but you want to try to refrain from taking this for too long. Because nonsteroidals have some side effects they can cause if you take them for too long. The fifth and final type of treatment that I'll mention briefly right now is surgery. Now our throb arthroscopic surgeries haven't really been proven to help osteoarthritis too much.
The only surgery that's really been proven, is a total knee replacement. This is the last case scenario, this is the last resort and you want to try exhausting all of your options before getting to this surgery. What they do is they cut off the ends of the bone and replace them with some type of prosthetic, either a metal piece or a plastic beast or some kind of combination. This usually holds for about 20 years, so they only do it after the age of 65 normally. Once again, I want to stress that this is the last resort type of management for this problem. All right, let's quickly review the five main types of treatments.
The first one is physical therapy. And again later on in this course we're going to show you the best type of exercises to do specifically frosty arthritis. The second type of treatment is losing weight, which is the most effective but also the hardest to do. The third type is local injections. We mentioned steroid injections, and we also mentioned some type of lubricant like hyaluronic acid. The fourth type of treatment is painkillers, which can be very effective, but you don't want to do for the long run.
And lastly, the last resort that we talked about is a total knee replacement surgery. All right, that's it for this video and we're going to close the topic here of osteoarthritis. If you have any questions about this, because it really is a big topic, be sure to write them down, send them into the to the Udemy website and we'll answer them as fast as possible.