Joint problems are a common affliction in adults.
Athletes and those who are very active physically are more likely to have pain and inflammation in their joints, as well as the elderly.
While you can have problems with any joint in your body, those that are heavily used, such as knees and elbows, experience the most difficulties.
If you are having joint problems and would like to investigate alternative therapies that may help treat your symptoms, PEMF therapy is a good choice.
With a proven track record of reducing inflammation and pain, and speeding tissue healing, PEMF can help with joint pain caused by a variety of conditions.
Why Problems in Joints Happen?
Joints are all the places in your body where bones connect.
Many of your joints that move regularly, such as your knees, elbows, shoulders, hips, and ankles, can develop problems.
Any damage to your joints can cause pain or loss of movement.
Joint problems usually consist of pain, inflammation, reduced range of motion, or discomfort in any of the components that make up your joints, including muscles, tendons, ligaments, bone, or cartilage.
Joint problems are usually mild, and typically result from inflammation, but some can be severe.
Joint issues can cause everything from minor discomfort and pain to minimal movement of the joint.
In most cases, joint problems are minor, or start that way.
The most common signs of joint issues are pain, swelling, tenderness, redness, or inflammation of the joint.
In cases of severe joint problems, you may also have a deformity in the joint, joint instability, extreme pain, or sudden swelling.
These usually result from some kind of trauma.
Causes of Joint Problems
Many different conditions can cause joint problems.
The most common cause of joint issues is arthritis.
Other conditions that can lead to joint issues include bursitis, gout, fibromyalgia, and tendinitis. Injuries such as strains, sprains, dislocations, and fractures also cause joint problems.
In less-common cases, joint problems can be caused by diseases such as bone cancer, leukemia, hypothyroidism, lupus, Lyme disease, rheumatic fever, or rickets.
Joint pain is a common symptom of many diseases and illnesses.
At least one in three adults has some sort of joint problem.
Knee pain ranks as the number-one joint issue, followed closely by shoulder and hip ones.
As you age, your joints become less resilient to forces and pressure, resulting in more inflammation and pain.
Treatment of Joint Problems
Many people are able to treat their joint problems at home.
Conventional self-care for joint issues involves a combination of rest, ice, and elevation.
Some people also find relief using over-the-counter pain treatments and anti-inflammatories such as ibuprofen or naproxen.
Topical creams containing capsaicin or methyl salicylate can help reduce pain and improve range of motion in a joint, as well.
These products are widely available over-the-counter.
If your joint problem is chronic and causing you significant difficulty, your doctor may recommend the use of injections to help with your symptoms.
Steroids are the most common of these, and when applied directly to the joint, this drug can reduce inflammation.
Injections are usually a temporary solution, as the effects last just a few months.
Your doctor may also perform a medical procedure to remove excess fluid from your joint, or inject a synthetic fluid into that joint to improve range of motion.
Many people benefit from physical therapy for their joint problems.
A physical therapist can teach you how to strengthen the muscles surrounding the joint, which can help stabilize and improve overall joint function.
PTs are also equipped to administer electrical nerve stimulation, which has been proven to help with joint problems.
The use of Pulsed Electromagnetic Field (PEMF) therapy has been a part of joint pain treatment for years.
Because the leading cause of joint problems is inflammation, this makes PEMF a perfect choice for treating joint problems; here’s why.
Your body experiences inflammation in response to T-cells, which are also called lymphocytes.
These cells protect your body from damage.
Inflammation is actually a protective response designed to help heal wounds and injuries.
When your lymphocytes have activated the inflammatory response for too long, though, long-term issues can occur, resulting in joint pain and other problems.
PEMF therapy can inactivate T cells, reducing inflammation and helping to treat joint problems.
Most people start to experience results between two and three days after PEMF treatment.
Continued use of this therapy is recommended, though, to stop the inflammatory response completely.
Effective treatments for joint pain and inflammation using PEMF have been noted in combinations that use both low-frequency/low-intensity and high-frequency/high-intensity pulses.
For best results, you should consider a high-frequency stimulation, around 50 Hz (1).
To place the importance of PEMF therapy in the context of the problem of joint issues, we should first examine a study published in the 2011 Annals of Internal Medicine.
Researchers were interested in the upward trend in diagnoses of knee pain, as well as the increasing prevalence of knee replacement surgery (2).
Researchers examined longitudinal data from six separate National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES), ranging in administration from 1971 to 2004.
They also reviewed results from the Framingham Osteoarthritis Study, which was conducted multiple times between 1983 and 2005.
These databases contain information relevant to the question of knee pain prevalence, as well as recommendations for knee replacement surgery for each patient.
By examining patients’ reported knee pain, radiographic evidence of osteoarthritis, and other information, researchers determined that knee pain prevalence has risen steadily over the past 20 years, even when accounting for age and weight, which play a significant role in the development of joint pain and osteoarthritis.
A study published in 2013 in the journal Clinical Interventions in Aging helps illustrate the power of PEMF therapy in the treatment of joint problems.
The researchers sought to understand the effects of PEMF therapy on patients with osteoarthritis in their knees, which was causing significant joint issues (3).
Since PEMF had previously proven to be a possible therapeutic tool for other bone and cartilage-related problems, the authors wanted to see how patients with knee osteoarthritis reacted to this treatment.
Arthritis is the leading cause of joint issues, so we could learn a great deal from this study.
Twenty-eight elderly patients between the ages of 60 and 83 were enrolled in this study.
Each had been previously diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis.
They each received PEMF therapy on their right leg three times per week for 30 minutes a session.
The treatment lasted six weeks.
Patients did not receive treatment on their left knee, which acted as a control for the experiment.
Each patient rated their symptoms for both knees on two separate scales throughout the study, as well as three months after treatment ended.
Comparing pretreatment to posttreatment reports of pain, stiffness, and joint function, patients consistently reported more positive results from the knee receiving PEMF treatment versus the control knee.
No patients reported adverse reactions to this treatment, either.
Therefore, for patients with osteoarthritis, PEMF could be a promising therapy to reduce pain and stiffness, while increasing physical function of problematic joints.
In another study examining the effects of PEMF on patients with fibromyalgia, similar results were reported.
The 2007 study was published in Pain Research & Management: The Journal of the Canadian Pain Society, and examined the impact of PEMF therapy on patients with diagnosed fibromyalgia (4).
Fibromyalgia is a disorder that produces joint pain in addition to other symptoms, including tenderness and pain throughout the body, fatigue, difficulty sleeping, and cognitive issues.
Because pain is widespread, localized PEMF therapy is not possible.
In this study, patients with either chronic generalized pain due to fibromyalgia, or chronic localized pain from unspecified conditions, were given PEMF treatment via their heads.
Treatments were administered at 400μT twice per day for 40 minutes per session over seven days.
Patients were asked to record their pain both before and after treatments using a visual analog pain scale.
These results were compared to a control group that was given a sham treatment.
Those patients with fibromyalgia noticed the largest difference in their pain symptoms.
A more extensive study is recommended to confirm these results, and to investigate the effects of PEMF therapy at varying frequencies and durations on patients with fibromyalgia pain.
In a 2013 meta-analysis published in the journal Rheumatology, researchers sought to understand the effects of PEMF therapy on knee pain and function, as compared to those of placebo treatments, by examining the wide range of already-published results in this area (5).
By studying the results of trials involving over 480 patients in treatment groups compared to those of nearly 450 patients in placebo groups, researchers found that the efficacy of PEMF in treating both pain and knee function was significantly higher.
In studies where the methodology was more rigorous, patients experienced significant improvement in their knee pain symptoms at four and eight weeks of treatment.
Most people saw improvement in function after eight weeks of PEMF treatment.
In addition to treating joint problems, PEMF therapy has been proven effective in treating other musculoskeletal issues, as well as other disorders that can affect your overall health and well-being.
Many athletes experience joint problems at some point in their lives.
Training, repetitive motion, and injury are common causes of joint problems for people active in sports.
When muscles are exposed to PEMF treatment, they are able to work harder, train longer, and recover more quickly after strenuous use.
PEMF could be a significant treatment, therefore, for athletes looking to improve their overall performance.
Strenuous exercise causes your cells to produce heat shock proteins that slow the breakdown of muscle tissue and improve your ability to recover.
You can boost this process with PEMF, causing the increased production of these proteins to lead to an even better recovery time.
PEMF can also improve sports performance by decreasing the pain often experienced after strenuous training.
Tissues heal faster, which means you can avoid injury and have less pain, while building muscle and increasing your stamina.
Athletes who use PEMF both before and after workouts experience the greatest benefit.
By stimulating the cells to produce more energy in the muscle tissues, PEMF can boost your energy output to as much as five times your normal rate, helping you train longer with less fatigue.
In addition to increasing blood flow, and improving pain and other symptoms associated with injury, PEMF has also been shown to help heal damaged nerves.
In a 1993 study involving sciatic nerve tissue, researchers found that pretreatment using PEMF caused positive stimulation of damaged nerve endings.
For those with nerve problems, this is wonderful news, as PEMF could help end chronic pain and heal damaged tissues for many (6).
PEMF has been used for nearly two decades as a treatment for those with reduced range of motion due to many health issues.
Published in 1996, a study in the journal Clinical Rheumatology provided evidence of the utility of PEMF application to patients with range of motion issues (7).
The 34 patients in this study all experienced reduced range of motion due to cervical osteoarthritis.
Not only did the majority note increases in their ability to move their joints, but also a decrease in pain symptoms.
A decrease in muscle spasms was also reported by many.
Joint difficulties are a common problem, especially as we age and our joints lose elasticity and the ability to withstand forces.
Joint issues can result in pain, swelling, inflammation, reduction in range of motion, and other, more severe, symptoms.
The most common causes of joint problems are inflammation due to arthritis; injury; and medical disorders that result in inflammation.
PEMF can be used to treat joint problems, as it is an effective treatment for reducing pain and inflammation, promoting healthy blood flow to your joints, increasing their range of motion, and treating nerve damage, as this can lead to joint problems.
PEMF has many additional benefits that make it an excellent therapeutic tool for use in cases of musculoskeletal disorders and injuries.
Richard Hoover is a PEMF expert and content contributor to PEMF Advisor. With a bachelor’s degree in physics and multiple certifications in natural health programs, he is one of the best PEMF experts around.
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