The best treatment for knee osteoarthritis isn’t a drug!

If you suffer from knee osteoarthritis, here’s a step you can take to reduce your pain and get more mobility.

Actually it’s 3,000 steps. But you don’t have to do them all at once.

A long-term study out of Boston University found that the best treatment for knee osteoarthritis is simply walking. And the amount of walking that had the most benefit was 3,000 steps.

Now 3,000 may sound like a lot (it’s a little over a mile), but it’s really not as much as you think. And you don’t have to take one long walk, either – all the steps you take, even in the house, add up throughout the day.

The goal, said researchers, is to reach a target of 6,000 steps a day. And you don’t have to throw away a lot of money on a FitBit or Apple Watch to track it. A simple pedometer that clips on your belt works just fine.

And the best news about increasing your steps has to do with your ability to keep moving in the future.

The more people with arthritis in their knees walked, the less likely they were to have severely limited mobility down the road, the study found.

But that’s not all. While researchers in Boston were studying steps, others in Chicago were looking at the best shoes to take those steps in.

And surprisingly, those thick-soled athletic ones didn’t make the cut. The very best shoe to help reduce stress on the knees, the researchers said, is a brand called the Mobility Shoe.

Mobility Shoes, which look a bit like golf or bowling shoes, have thin, flat and flexible soles. They also have groves at the places where your feet flex when you walk, making the sensation as close as possible to walking barefoot. And that’s the whole idea.

Dr. Matteson, from the Mayo Clinic, who conducted the shoe study, noted that we’re not born with shoes on and that for most of the “history of mankind,” we either didn’t have shoes or wore simple, flat ones.

Source:

“Knee osteoarthritis: Daily walking maintains function” Janis C. Kelly, Medscape, Medscape.com