Hip Pain
Hip Pain Explained
Evidence-Informed Treatment Options for Hip Pain
Hip-region pain may come from the hip joint, periarticular tendons or bursae, lumbar spine, sacroiliac joint, or peripheral nerves. Treatment begins by identifying the likely source.
- Intra-articular hip corticosteroid injection: may provide short-term improvement in pain and function for selected symptomatic hip osteoarthritis patients. Image guidance is recommended for accurate intra-articular placement.
- Trochanteric/periarticular treatment: is diagnosis-specific and may include rehabilitation or targeted injection when bursitis or tendinopathy is clinically established.
- PRP: may be discussed in selected cases, but evidence for hip osteoarthritis is less established and less consistent than the knee-OA evidence; it should not be described as regenerating the hip joint.
- Radiofrequency procedures: should target specifically identified sensory articular branches in selected patients rather than be marketed as generic RFA for all hip pain.
- Surgical evaluation: remains appropriate for advanced structural disease when nonsurgical treatment is unlikely to provide adequate benefit.
Diagnosis-specific hip articular branch evaluation is a knee procedure and is not a hip-pain treatment.
