The Pill-Free Walking Tweak That Relieves Chronic Knee Pain
Slightly changing your gait can stop knee pain as well as medication, researchers find
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With a slight adjustment in walking gait, subjects in the study, led by researchers at the University of Utah, found knee pain could be resolved without surgery or medication. Photo: Unsplash
Living with knee pain can make everyday movement and even sleeping difficult, impacting your quality of life and mobility. If you are having side effects from the medication you’re taking for knee pain, or worrying about the prospect of future surgery, a new study offers a renewed hope. Researchers at the University of Utah have discovered that slightly changing how you walk can relieve knee pain just as well as common medications.
The year-long study focused on people with mild to moderate osteoarthritis on the inner side of the knee, a common area for natural wear and tear. Researchers used computer simulations to find a personalised foot adjustment for each participant. This meant turning their feet either toe-in or toe-out by 5 to 10 degrees to see which offloaded the most pressure without any medication.
This adjustment was made alongside regular treadmill training, with participants using wearable shin sensors that provided real-time vibration feedback to help them maintain their new foot angle. Practising the new gait for just 20 minutes a day helped make the new walking style automatic for the trial patients.
The Striking Results
The findings published in The Lancet Rheumatology paint a promising picture for people living with chronic pain:
91% success rate: the vast majority of the gait-retraining group achieved significant pain relief, matching the benefits typically seen from standard arthritis medications.
7.5% less joint load: changing the foot angle successfully shifted weight away from the damaged areas, allowing pain relief and less stress through the joint.
Slowing down damage: follow-up MRI scans showed that this simple walking adjustment actually slowed down cartilage damage inside the joint compared to the placebo group.
Why It Matters for the Chronic Pain Community
For anyone navigating chronic knee pain, this study shows a safe and medication-free way to manage symptoms that can be debilitating, while simultaneously protecting your joints.
Because the ideal foot angle differs from one person to the next, it is not something that can be replicated at home or standardised for all. However, the same researchers are working to bring this technology out of specialised labs and into standard physiotherapy clinics, as the overwhelming results of their study prove that small movement tweaks can improve your quality of life and remove the need for medication and potentially surgery.
This has far-reaching implications and not just for the osteoarthritis community, but for other conditions such as hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which causes an excessive range of mobility in joints, leading to soft tissue and joint damage over time, as well as chronic pain, guarding and eventually, stiffness. Shifting the movement pattern back into a safe range could help alleviate the daily injuries (including partial or full dislocations) and pain that hypermobility brings.
If you’re concerned about pain and finding it hard to make progress with your GP, delve into the ways you can make your doctor take your discomfort seriously. There are also some useful mobility aids you can consider to offload the problematic joint.
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