I have some bad joints from a motorcycle accident and from overuse, namely my shoulders, hip, finger, and achilles heel and knee. I am currently trying 1500 mg a day of glucosamine and 1400 a day of chondriotin sulfate formula from Twin Lab, but I was wondering if this was enough to make a difference… I know there are a handful of different joint supplements out there. Should I just stick to this for a while or should I go on a bunch of stuff all at once?
Really I just want overall joint health, since I scrapped cartilage off my kneecap a while back and my achilles gets really tight after playing basketball. I also have tendonitis-like feeling in my ring finger for the past year.
The two people I know who took these supplements were on them for something like six weeks+ before they finally felt better. It could also have been that they were getting better gradually and they didn’t notice the benefits until someone asked.
They both claimed they worked though.
You can also go nuts with some joint-rejuvination exercises that are supposed to help. Pavel has a book on this, although it’s most likely not worth the $35 he charges. Basically the idea is that if you awake each morning and put each joint through a full range of motion for several reps (I think they use the your age x2) you will inrease the synovial fluid between the bones and “grease up” your joints. Makes sense to me, but I don’t know about the efficacy of such exercises. Worth a shot though. Some good digging and you can find some recommended exercises, but I believe most forms of QiGong and Tai Chi (also yoga and bodywight calisthenics) will do the trick.
As someone who’s been through a ton of rehab for an ankle injury and associated post-traumatic arthritis, anecdotally, I tried glucosamine/chontroitin supplements for a couple of months and didn’t feel they did anything. Some people swear by them, though.
As for exercise: according to my ortho doc any exercise, particularly that which increases range of motion and flexibility, is a good thing. With joint degradation, unless you’re exercising to the point that you’re damaging joints or cartilage, it’'s very much "use it or lose it;"when I had to be non-weight bearing on one leg for nearly a year, I lost so much range of motion in my ankle that I couldn’t even stand flat on that foot, and it’s taken a long, long time to get back to anything approaching normal. Hundreds of hours of physical therapy, a lot of exercie, and a lot of pain and too many anti-inflammatories.
I’d sy try one thing at a time, and if it works, stick with it. If you take a bunch of things at the same time, you won’t know which one works and you’ll take a bunch of unnecessary and expensive stuff with unknown side effects.
While glucosamine and chondroitin may, indeed, do you some good, the tough thing it to make sure you’re getting what you pay for. As supplements, these products aren’t very tightly regulated. I can’t find the cite at the moment, but I recall a study done a couple of years ago that found that chondroitin supplements, in particular, often didn’t contain the potency promised by the label (the glucosamine supplements fared much better, IIRC). Even fairly respectable name brands often contained less than half the amount of chondroitin they were supposed to.
Frankly, I don’t know what the answer is - it’s not as if there’s someplace you can go to make sure that you really are getting 1400 mg of chondroitin.
Another question: A pharmacist told me recently that gucosamine and chondroitin would only help arthritis and not me being 23 years old with conditional injuries. Is there any truth to this?
Chairman Pow’s post about Pavel’s advice needs a little change, IMO. Putting your ailing joints through their range of motion many times is a good way to get your bursae oiled up. However, it should be done without putting your body weight on the joint. A stationary bicycle is pretty good for this; deep knee bends from standing are definitely out.
My husband had an arthritic shoulder that nearly had him in tears, and he’s doing great since going on the supplements. I don’t know what that means, but he’s able to work out now, where he could barely move the joint before.
It’s basically synthetic cartilage, which is injected directly into the joint capsule with a syringe roughly the size of a horse tranquilizer gun. (Or as my doc put it, “just think of it as a lube job.”) The injection process was not fun, to say the least, and I had a bad reaction to the first couple of shots (the worst my doc has ever seen, and he’s a foot and ankle specialist). My ankle swelled up like a balloon, and I couldn’t put any weight at all on it for nearly a week.
However, it was supposed to provide partial relief for 6-12 months, but in conjunction with orthotics, I’m now at nearly 3 years and going strong without needing anti-inflammatories on a regular basis, surgery, or in fact any additional treatment. In addition, please note that last I checked, it wasn’t FDA-approved for any body part except knees, so other joints would be an off-label use. Might be worth asking about, though.