Is it hip pain or back pain?

Osteoarthritis or arthritis symptoms in the hip are typically deeper in your hips and are those symptoms that are found in your groin, thigh, or deep in your butt. When you typically think about pain that occurs in your hip as a physician, you always have to consider, is the pain actually coming from the hip. So when someone says they have hip pain, you've got to think about three main things. One is hip pain from hip arthritis; two is hip pain that is caused by soft tissue pain such as bursitis pain, muscle strain or pull and pain that is referred from your back. Often times we will use joint injections into the hip joint as a way of differentiating back pain from hip pain.

Any pain that's relieved by a hip injection we can infer is the percentage of symptoms that are coming from your hip joint itself. If those joint injections are not effective in controlling your symptoms, oftentimes we would refer the patient to a back specialist to see if a pinched nerve in your back is causing radiating pain to your hip. Typically symptoms that are coming from your hip arthritis eventually cause you to not want to do recreational activities that you enjoy. So typically just pain from biking too far or walking too far will generally recede in 12 to 24 hours. Pain that is from arthritis is going to last longer and as arthritis pain gets worse, it will go from being episodic pain to pain that's present almost with any activity during the day.