Chronic Hip Pain

Pain only serves one purpose. It is a pointer. It is a mechanism for getting and holding your attention.

At the first twinges of hip pain, it is time to pay attention. If you know someone whose life has been curtailed by chronic hip pain, you understand loss of hip joint health is something to be avoided at all costs.

And if you think hip replacement surgery is a simple answer to the problem, you are sadly mistaken. Artificial hip joints are no substitute for the miracle of the healthy human hip.

If you are starting to experience hip pain, the sooner you address the root cause, the less time it will take for the inflammation to subside and for the joint to heal without permanent damage.

Even mild or intermittent hip pain is worrisome. Intuitively, you probably know that yours is a progressive condition. Left on its own, it doesn’t get better, it gets worse.

If you are dealing with relatively serious chronic hip pain, you’re possibly contemplating surgery. But can you really trust what you are being told by your orthopedic surgeon?

Where should you turn for help?

The research suggests that orthopedic surgeons prefer to do surgery and will be unlikely to look seriously at the many potential causes of chronic hip pain, much less the avenues of self-care available to you.

There is an old saying, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, every job looks like a nail." For a surgeon to make the average $420,000 a year salary (and yes, there are very few female orthopedic surgeons), he needs to be in the operating room every working day.

How can this be?

Think of the wizardry of computer graphics. Imagine taking a 2-dimensional image and turning it into a 3-dimensional image using the magic of computers. Of course, any computer transformation like that is built on a complex set of assumptions about the 2D image they are interpreting into 3D.

Therein lies the problem.

Orthopedic assumptions intrinsic to pelvic alignment and the root causes of chronic hip pain are both incorrect and self-serving. Not surprisingly, the modern imaging all too often suggests the need for surgery.

In the First Aid for Chronic Hip Pain video course, I share shocking truths about the orthopedics industry as revealed by its own latest research, and the medical coverup that is costing untold thousands of women their hip joints every year.

Losing a natural hip is a catastrophe. As amazing as artificial hip technology is, it is never a substitute for the perfection of the natural hip. Furthermore, the many surgeries that have been developed to "repair" or "clean out" the joint are intrinsically destabilizing, and frequently lead to hip replacement.

The legitimate alternative.

First of all, orthopedics is totally focused on “fixing” the problem with surgery.

Actually, this is a relatively new phenomenon. Historically, orthopedics was a healing art and not a surgical specialty. For 100 years, traditional doctors fought bitterly to prevent orthopedics from becoming a surgical specialty. However, the lure of the power, prestige, and money involved in orthopedic surgery was just too great, and the true orthopedic physicians have all faded into history.

At Whole Woman, our focus is on recognizing pelvic problems as symptoms. If you are experiencing even mild or moderate hip pain, your hip joint is inflamed. While it’s possible the pain may improve by itself, it could also worsen into a chronic condition. 

When you are struggling with serious chronic hip pain, doubtless your quality of life is suffering. Sleep may be disrupted, standing, walking, and exercising can be anywhere from uncomfortable to excruciating.

You are confronted with two questions:

“Has the hip joint inflammation become serious enough, and gone on long enough, that there is likely to be permanent damage to the joint?”

And…

“Am I prepared to use this pain as a teacher and follow wherever it leads me to changes in posture, diet, gait, shoe choices or anything else?”

If your answer to the second question is, “Yes,” then you stand a reasonable chance of at least stabilizing and experiencing some if not full reversal of your discomfort.

There is no quick fix for serious chronic hip pain. The underlying cause did not appear overnight, and the inflammation and pain won’t go away overnight.

However, the body’s capacity for healing is astonishing if you simply give it a chance. But you cannot keep doing what you have always done in life and expect anything to be different with your hip health.

One objective of the First Aid for Chronic Hip Pain course has been to reframe viewers’ perspective that, “Oh, I can always go get hip replacement surgery.” Of course you can do that, but the odds are very high that you will have traded one set of potentially manageable problems, for a set of problems that are not reversible, including knee and ankle failure due to changes in your gait.

So starting the journey to hip health is your best option.

The root cause of pelvic organ prolapse and urinary incontinence is improper pelvic alignment. Sucking in the belly and tucking under the tailbone, which women have been taught for generations, is a profoundly unnatural conformation for the female body.

For the hips, tucking under the pelvis changes the natural dynamics of the joint. In a healthy hip, the roof of the hip socket, or acetabulum, sits symmetrically over the head of the femur, or thigh bone.

Consequently, this primary load bearing joint is fully and evenly supported. However, when you tuck your bottom the acetabulum rotates backward, so it no longer symmetrically supports the femur. This creates a hot spot on the front, inside surface of the hip socket, where virtually all chronic hip breakdown is known to occur.

Restoring natural posture and gait creates the conditions for a lifetime of hip health.

Further, what the medical system refuses to acknowledge, in spite of the information having been available for almost a century, is that the hip joint is very subject to infection. Chlamydia, gonorrhea, staph, and strep are just a few of the infectious microbes with high affinity for the hip joint.

The reason why is that the hip joint contains a synovial membrane, which is a mucus membrane, and as such feeds a thriving microbiome. In their drive to perform surgery, orthopedists virtually never address these alternative sources of inflammation.

It is not only possible, but highly likely that a woman could contract a mild “cold” in her hip joint, only to be treated with arthroscopic surgery, labral repair, and a host of other highly suspect and damaging operative procedures.

Your hips can and should support you safely and comfortably for a lifetime.

Hip pain is just your body’s way of shooting up a flare and saying, “Pay attention!”

Successfully creating and sustaining hip health, like all self-care practices, requires education, support, and persistence.

If your pain is serious, it will take some serious effort and time to restore your hips. It is certainly possible that your hip joint is beyond recovery, but the trauma of hip surgery and potential associated problems are severe enough that you owe it to yourself to exhaust all other possibilities before making that irreversible commitment.