If the hip joint or other joints clicks and pain is felt, this indicates the presence of a disease in them. Timely diagnosis and proper treatment will eliminate extraneous sounds and other accompanying symptoms.
Why does the hip click?
Many of us are faced with a situation where the hip joint clicks and the so-called feeling of jamming occurs. This usually occurs while standing up, walking, and rotating the leg. The sound of a click is formed due to the friction of part of the muscle or tendon against the protruding part of the femur.
This phenomenon is called click thigh syndrome. Often clicks are harmless, painless and do not bring discomfort, except that their frequent manifestation can be annoying. Most often, people whose legs undergo regular flexion, such as athletes and dancers, suffer from the syndrome.
List of reasons
- In the hip joint, the friction of the muscles and tendons on the bone structure occurs in the outer areas, where the ileo-tibial tract passes over the greater trochanter of the femur. In the position of the straightened thigh, the tract is located behind the large trochanter. When the hip joint flexes, the tendons move forward relative to the greater trochanter. The components of the tract resemble a dense rubber tape that is capable of stretching. Tendons rub against a slightly protruding large trochanter, and you can hear the hip joint snapping. Sometimes this leads to bursitis. With bursitis, the synovial bag becomes inflamed and thickens , the standard gliding of the muscles relative to the bone is disrupted.
- Tendons of the rectus femoris extend along its front surface and join the pelvic bone. When the hip bends, the tendon moves about its head. When straightening the leg, the tendon is in place. The joint clicks in the thigh due to such reciprocating movements of the tendon over the femoral head.
- The clicks occur as a result of tears in the articular cartilage or if broken cartilage particles form in the joint cavity. In such a situation, the click may be accompanied by pain and dysfunction of the motor apparatus. If parts of the articular cartilage come off, then the hip joint is blocked.
- Arthrosis, arthritis, ankylosis lead to unpleasant sounds in the hip joint.
- Damaged tendons, cartilage, their degeneration.
- Increased joint flexibility from birth.
Hip click treatment
If the joint clicks, but there is no pain, then nothing needs to be treated. But for those who are greatly confused by clicking sounds, there are specific ways to eliminate them at home:
- monitor the level of physical activity - minimize, it is better to abandon completely;
- apply a compress with ice to the hip joint;
- use non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs that will reduce discomfort;
- prevent repetitive movements of the hip joint during sports, physical exercises, for example, reduce the number of squats, bike runs, swim only with the hands.
If after these measures the joint still clicks, it is disturbed by discomfort and pain, then you need to seek professional medical help. The treatment is as follows:
- Visits to the physiotherapy room are prescribed, where, using special exercises, they make stretching of the thigh muscles, which reduce unpleasant sensations.
- With the development of bursitis of the hip joint, the doctor may prescribe anti-inflammatory injections with hormones (corticosteroids).
- Surgical intervention. An operation is prescribed if other methods have not yielded results. To know what operation to carry out, you need to identify the cause of the disease. Arthroscopy of the hip joint will help in this matter .
Knee-joint
In some people, the knee clicks while walking, while bending or extending the leg. This may indicate the presence of a disease in it, especially if the clicks are accompanied by pain. It is important not to start the joint - not to bring about swelling, inflammation and timely seek medical advice, because in the early stages you can still do something.
Causes of a knee click
1. Pathological. A chronic disease can occur in the body, the syndrome of which is clicks during movement and pain in the knee joint:
- arthrosis, instability of the patella, tendonitis, gout and other joint diseases in which cartilage tissue is destroyed;
- salt deposition provokes clicks in the knee;
- varicose veins;
- new and old injuries of the knee joint;
- various inflammations that appear on the background of infection.
Detect these diseases will help X-ray, MRI and blood test.
2. Physiological. Means that the joint clicks in the knee not because of a serious illness, but because of:
- differences in joint geometry; its surfaces during contact do not ideally coincide and a click is heard when walking;
- the knee bone protrudes above the ligaments; moving, the joint touches the bone and clicks.
The physiological causes of extraneous sounds in the joint do not pose any health hazard and do not require medical intervention.
How to treat a knee joint?
When the knee joint clicks and pain, inflammation or swelling occurs, the doctor will first deal with the elimination of these symptoms with the help of drugs:
- for pain, analgesics are prescribed;
- anti-infectious agents if there is an infection;
- anti-inflammatory drugs are used for edema;
- chondoprotectors help cure and restore cartilage.
A good addition to the medicine will be physiotherapy. The patient is sent to procedures that help eliminate clicks and discomfort in the knees:
- laser procedures prevent cell degeneration and at the initial stage are able to stop the disease and prevent it from developing;
- UHF therapy - the impact on the knee joint with an electric current leads to normalization of blood circulation and the influx of beneficial elements to the snapping joint;
- electrophoresis is in addition to the prescribed drugs, with its help they are better absorbed.
Knuckles
The arm consists of several joints: carpal, ulnar and shoulder. Under certain conditions, each of them can make clicking sounds. As with the hip or knee joints, it is necessary to find out the cause of the crunch. For example, the wrist joint clicks with such diseases:
- arthritis;
- arthrosis;
- tendonitis;
- osteoarthrosis;
- de Kerven's disease;
- brush injury.
Any of these ailments is accompanied by pain in the hand, discomfort, sometimes inflammation, swelling. The full functioning of the wrist is limited. Treatment is carried out with drugs, physiotherapy, physical therapy, massages.
Click the joints of the hands and in the elbow. A common cause is arthrosis, which occurs against a background of trauma or inflammation. During the period of the disease, the amount of synovial fluid in the elbow joint decreases, the cartilage becomes thinner, then tears.
Shoulder joint
The shoulder joint clicks as a result of an arbitrary dislocation or subluxation. According to studies, they occur due to slipping of the biceps or deltoid muscle from the bony protrusions and changes in the mucous bags.
The shoulder joint may make clicking or cracking sounds. For example, a click will be heard when, under the influence of an increasing load or mobility, pressure inside the synovial fluid increases and air bubbles form that burst. This condition is painless and does not harm health.
Crackling sounds indicate that the joint is worn out and its mechanism of work is broken or sprain and the presence of diseases.
Why else clicks the shoulder joint?
- Sedentary lifestyle.
- Improper nutrition and metabolic disturbance, the result is salt deposition and crunching.
- Heredity.
- Injuries, increased physical activity, hypermobility.
- Infections, inflammatory processes.
Finger clicks
Click the joints of the fingers in such diseases:
- stenotic tenosynovitis;
- Nott's disease ;
- stenosing ligamentitis ;
- knotty tendonitis;
- springing and snapping finger.
With these diseases, the finger is blocked in a bent or unbent position, making a click. A swelling appears on top of it, the tendon becomes denser, pain is felt at the base of the affected finger, first with any movements, then at rest.
Children's joints
With the onset of vigorous activity, i.e., even in infancy, the child’s joints crackle and snap. This happens because the children are hypermobile, but their cartilage has not yet fully formed, which means that they can make sounds with any movements. Even in adolescents, the joint-ligamentous apparatus is still not very mature.
It is necessary to worry if clicks are accompanied by pain and restriction of movement. In this case, you need to contact an orthopedist, pass an appropriate blood test, undergo an X-ray and X-ray.
It happens that in a child the joints click due to the pathology of the connective tissue - it is very weak and the flexibility of the joints is increased. In addition, in children with such a pathology, heart diseases are often detected.
Do not forget about diseases of the musculoskeletal system, such as dysplasia, arthrosis and others. After all, they also provoke clicks in children's joints.
How to help the joints?
If the joints click across the body, you can resort to drug-free methods of treatment:
- Physical activity - physical therapy classes, daily walks. Great swimming. It is advisable to discuss the amount of exercise and the variety of exercises with your doctor, because some of them may be contraindicated.
- Massotherapy. In chronic joint diseases, rubbing, light stroking, kneading is acceptable. If there is acute inflammation, massage is contraindicated.
- Proper nutrition. Being overweight often leads to gout, arthrosis of the hip and knee. The optimal amount of protein should be ingested.
- Maintaining water balance so that synovial fluid does not decrease in the diseased cartilage;
- In infants, the development of the hip joint and the correct setting of the feet while walking are monitored.
When the joints click, what to do, the doctor will tell. Depending on his diagnosis, treatment is prescribed. It can be conservative, i.e., medication or surgical treatment - an operation is prescribed.
The effectiveness of folk remedies in the treatment of joints has not been confirmed. Most likely, the patient feels an improvement as a result of self-hypnosis. But if there are no contraindications, you can treat joints with alternative methods.