Description
Dr. Paul Inclan is an orthopaedic sports medicine surgeon at UAMS Health. He specializes in complex knee surgery, ACL reconstruction and hip preservation. He currently serves as head team physician for the UA Little Rock Trojans. In this video, he discusses the thought behind establishing the young adult hip clinic at UAMS Health along with signs that you may have issues with your hip. Treatments offered at the young adult hip clinic can dramatically help your quality of life and stop any further problems from developing later in life.
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Transcript
The hip in the young adult patient is particularly challenging because there are multiple layers of the hip. There’s the bones. There’s the cartilage and the labrum — which is fibrocartilage. There are the muscles around the hip. And then hip pain can sometimes come from your back. It can sometimes come from aspects of your pelvis. It can sometimes come from the muscle groups around your hip. So when we treat your hip, we have to look at all of these possibilities to make sure we give you the right diagnosis.
Hip preservation and the young adult hip have only really been around since the early 2000s when hip preservation was first described. And so it’s a rapidly changing field where entire journals are dedicated to understanding, “How do we treat hip pain in the 20- and 30-year-old?
I think the real benefit of the young adult hip clinic at UAMS Health is that we can look at your hip from multiple different perspectives to provide you the right diagnosis, the right treatment plan and the right surgeon or non-operative provider to carry out that treatment plan. We’re better when we work together and I think that’s a real strength here at UAMS Health.
I think one of the most common early signs of a structural problem within the hip is pain when you sit for a long time, pain with athletic activities particularly those that involve squatting or twisting, uh our groin pain that just aches and doesn’t seem to go away. A lot of times people think it’s just a groin strain or a pulled muscle, but sometimes it can be an early sign that you have a hip impingement or hip dysplasia which could benefit from evaluation.
I think classically, what we see with the young patient experiencing hip pain is they have pain that wraps from the front of their hip down towards the inside and that’s really where hip pain from the joint comes from.
It’s never too early to have us evaluate your hip. And in many cases where patients are having mild symptoms or haven’t tried any conservative care — meaning non-surgical care — we can place them with the right group of physical therapists, we can talk about doing injections within the hip and we can talk about anti-inflammatory medications. And in those cases, we can sometimes avoid surgery altogether.
