Gluteus Medius Tendonitis

Gluteus Medius Tendonitis
The gluteus medius tendon connects the gluteus medius muscle to your pelvis. Its job is to help you move your thigh/leg away from your body and stabilize your hip while walking, running, and jumping. What is Gluteus Medius Tendonitis? Gluteus medius tendonitis (sometimes spelled tendinitis and pronounced 'tendinitus') is an injury where your gluteus medius tendon is irritated or inflamed. You will feel this irritation, swelling and inflammation when there is a strain, damage or micro-tearing to the tendon tissue. This injury can happen from overuse of the tendon or an accident of some kind. The hip is a complicated joint and so if you are suffering from gluteus medius tendonitis it might be hard to tell. Pain can easily be transferred to other areas of the hip, thigh, lower back or buttock. Sometimes pain can even shoot down the side of your leg. If left untreated, gluteus medius tendonitis can turn into a chronic condition or degeneration of your tendon fibers. Anyone can suffer from tendinitis, but it's most common in adults due to degeneration of tissue as we age. Over time the tendons in the hip will wear down resulting in something called degeneration. This is where the fibers in your tendons will become more weak - it's just a natural process that happens as we age. Chronic inflammation of the gluteus medius tendon (tendinopathy) that results from many small tears over time from overuse, repetitive movements, or friction from a tight iliotibial band. In many cases, degeneration of the gluteus medius tendon is associated with greater trochanteric bursitis; the combined injury is called greater trochanteric pain syndrome. When chronic gluteus medius tendinitis occurs, the gluteus medius tendon is vulnerable to subsequent injury and degeneration that may result in a tear. What's the Difference Between Gluteus Medius Tendonitis, Tendinosis and Tenosynovitis? Tendinosis is basically like tendonitis but it's not caused by an injury. Tendinosis is caused by chronic degeneration (wearing away) of tendon fibers over time. This is a natural thing that happens to our tissue as we age. Where tendonitis is damage or micro-tearing to your tendon, tenosynovitis is damage or micro-tearing to the sheath covering your tendon. This sheath is a protective lining for your tendon and is made up of synovium. If this sheath is injured it can also become irritated resulting in similar symptoms as tendonitis (pain, swelling and inflammation). It's possible for you to have tendonitis / tendinosis AND tenosynovitis at the same time creating a more complicated hip tendonitis injury. What are the Symptoms of Gluteus Medius Tendonitis? If you have gluteus medius tendonitis you may experience pain over the outermost side of your hip, the upper side of your buttock and even in the lower back at the spine. You may also experience swelling, warmth or redness around your injury and the pain often gets worse by moving your hip. Weakness in your hip and surrounding muscles and loss of range of motion while moving your leg away from the body are also some common symptoms of this condition. What Causes Gluteus Medius Tendonitis? There are many causes to gluteus medius tendonitis, some of which include: The natural structure and alignment of your pelvis and hip can cause a tilt that changes the way your tendon will move and work (and other muscles, bursae, etc. that the tendon might rub up against). If you normally walk by crossing your foot across your midline toward the other leg, when running. Short leg syndrome - a condition where your legs are not of equal length that may affect the tilt of your hips and pelvis. A naturally wide pelvis and excessively knocked knees. A sudden increase in the intensity, frequency, or duration of exercise. Repetitive activities such as long distance running, walking, and training for triathlons, biathlons or marathons. How Do I Diagnose Gluteus Medius Tendonitis? Hip pain is a very common problem and there are many causes of hip pain. It can be hard to discover the condition that you are dealing with. Are you are having trouble sleeping on that side of your hip? Are you having pain standing, walking are after sitting for any length of time? The best way to diagnose this condition is with a visit to your doctor for a physical examination of your hip. During a physical examination of your injured hip, your doctor will be looking for weakness and pain in the hip area. Your hips should be at the same level and they may also look at the results of something called the 'Trendelenburg's Test'. This test is done by standing on one leg and allowing the pelvis to drop on the opposite side while lifting your opposite (healthy) leg/hip. Your doctor will know that you have gluteus medius tendonitis (or weakness in your hip muscles) if you lift the opposite (healthy) leg/hip and you're unable to maintain your balance while you stand (you may also experience a shooting pain) (reference: 1, 2). It's important to have a proper diagnosis from a doctor or some other medical professional to determine the cause of your symptoms. This way the right treatment can be used to treat the condition and relieve your pain. If you suspect you have tendonitis in your hip, Usually conservative treatment methods are all that's needed to treat hip tendinitis, surgery is only ever used if long-term conservative treatment methods don't work or if you've suffered from a ruptured tendon in your hip. Conservative treatment options for hip tendinitis typically includes rest, icing of the injury, strengthening exercises, avoiding activities that cause or worsen the pain that you're feeling and anti-inflammatory over-the-counter medication (reference: 1, 2). If treated properly gluteus medius tendonitis usually heals within in 2 to 6 weeks. Second, if your doctor has decided that your injury can be treated with conservative treatment options, then you'll find that many of our customers have had great success treating themselves with our powerful conservative treatment products - the Back/Hip Freezie Wrap® and Inferno Wrap®. Or, if surgical intervention is required, talk with your doctor about using these same products for post-surgery recovery as you'll find them to be effective for reducing post-surgery inflammation, enhancing range of motion and reducing scar tissue growth. ... and Re-injury of your hip must be avoided at all costs! Constant re-injury (you know when it's happening, you can feel the pain) needs to be avoided at all costs. Obviously, it delays the healing process, but what's worse is that every re-injury and additional healing cycle increases the amount of scar tissue that builds up around your original tendinitis injury. Over time the small tears and degeneration of the gluteus medius tendon is related to greater trochanteric bursitis. Chronic gluteus medius tendinitis can occur as the tissue is damaged and in a weakened state leading to partial or full-thickness tear of the tendon. Scar tissue is hard, inflexible, and tough to get rid of. The more severe your hip tendinitis is, the more likely that this scar tissue will make your tendon much more prone to injury again later on. The more scar tissue that develops, the more you lose the range of motion in your hip and leg. Continuous re-injury and build-up of scar tissue while staying active means you'll have a greater chance of winding up with on-going pain, more tearing in your tendon or a full rupture. If you have pain and inflammation in your hip, buttock and/or your tail bone, it's very important to heal your injury quickly and completely. You must avoid the build up of scar tissue. If you don't, your hip tendinitis injury may plague you forever. This is why it's so important to continuously use conservative treatment tools to heal any recurring tendon damage before it can build into something big. For any hip tendinitis sufferer, having the right tools makes all the difference. Mild and moderate cases of tendinitis / strained tendons are best treated with conservative home therapies. Severe injury to the tendon (ruptured tendons) will require surgery to re-attach the tendon to your bone or bring the edges of the tear together. If you suspect that you've ruptured your tendon be sure to speak with your doctor for suggested treatment. Step 1 - Reduce Pain and Swelling with Cold Compression The first step for conservative treatment of your hip tendinitis is to reduce the swelling to "open up" the area for more blood flow. Anyone in the health-care business knows that your blood supplies the oxygen and much needed nutrients required to heal hip tendinitis injuries. This is why for years, doctors, trainers, and other medical professionals have recommended RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) to treat the pain and swelling of fresh injuries, chronic pain, and after any re-injury. Although RICE can help to treat these symptoms, ice and freezer gel packs reach temperatures so low they can cause cryoburn, an ice burn on your skin. The problem is, up until now there hasn't been any other option to treat painful conditions and injuries, so ice and blue gel packs (full of anti-freeze and chemicals) have been the only choice available. Fortunately you no longer have to settle for these ice cold methods that are uncomfortably cold against your skin, provide short term relief, cause ice burns, numb your skin and underlying tissue beyond feeling so you don't even notice the ice burn until it's too late and pool around your injury putting the cold everywhere except for where you need it most. A Freezie Wrap® allows you to treat your hip in an effective and convenient way. Our Freezie Wraps® will wrap around your hip keeping the cold right over your hip injury for the entire length of your treatment. Our food-grade, non-toxic gel packs can be chilled in the fridge or freezer to tailor the amount of cold that you need for your injury. It doesn't matter how you cool it down, because our gel packs are chock full of gel that's designed to cool down into millions of tiny snowflakes. This method of cooling means our gel packs aren't icy-cold and stay flexible even right out of the freezer! The cushioned gel will wrap around your hip and it won't budge for the entire treatment period. You'll no longer have to deal with annoying pooling around your hip or have to hold a hard block of ice on your injury! This is important because once blood vessels are blocked or damaged, they can no longer carry oxygenated blood through the tissue and tissue cells begin to break-down. Without cold compression therapy cellular break-down and tissue damage continues as the cells don't get the oxygen they need to survive. By limiting the amount of damage done to your tendon, you also limit the amount of healing that needs to occur. This is a very important step to heal tendon injuries faster and with less pain! This is why you need to treat your hip pain right after it's hurt, when you notice pain / swelling / inflammation, or directly after a re-injury. Applying a Freezie Wrap® right away will stop the damage immediately and unblock your blood vessels to let your body's natural blood flow in to start healing the tissue. It'll seem weird for you to read this, but there are a LOT of people out there that don't understand how fast cold compression with a Back/Hip Freezie Wrap® can get the swelling / inflammation in your hip under control! After you get rid of the swelling for good you can start dealing with your hip injury and pain head on. Step 2 - Improve Circulation, Soften Scar Tissue & Prevent Re-Injury with Blood Flow Stimulation Therapy After the inflammation around your injured tendon has been reduced, you need to provide extra blood flow to strengthen your tendon tissue. Promoting blood flow to your hip tendinitis to help your body heal itself is a concept that has been utilized for centuries. Oxygen and nutrients, carried within the blood, are critical for the body to heal itself. Without proper blood flow, your recovery from hip tendinitis will be delayed... sometimes for a very long period of time. Even though the concept is simple, improving blood flow to your hip while it's injured can be difficult. Traditional methods require your hip to move in order to promote blood flow - but that same motion that promotes blood flow can also make your pain and tendonitis much worse. Relying on movement alone to increase blood flow puts you in danger of re-injuring your hip. So what do you do when you need to increase blood flow, but you can't move your hip without re-injuring your tendon? Using Blood Flow Stimulation Therapy™ (BFST®), will help with your recovery and heal your tendon more completely. BFST® increases the amount of blood that flows naturally to your soft tissue to nourish your tendons, improving elasticity and speeding the healing process. This increased Blood Flow Stimulation Therapy to your tendon is greatly needed. The only way to get BFST® is through use of an Inferno Wrap®. The Inferno Wrap® is the only treatment method that improves blood flow and circulation on a deep tissue level. Other methods of warming / heating tissue (hot water bottles, hot baths, etc) will only ever increase blood flow on a surface / skin level. These methods need a LOT of time to even reach your tendon on a deep tissue level. And even if you were to use them this long your skin would heat up to an uncomfortable level and may even burn you. The best source of heat treatment is from a product where you don't even feel that much heat. When you don't feel the heat, it means the therapy is working in your deep soft tissue which is really where you need it. It's kind of like how your heart works in your body. You can't "feel" your heart pumping blood all around your body to your arms and legs. You can't even hear your own heartbeat without listening very closely. This is exactly how deep tissue BFST® works too! You're not supposed to "feel" a lot of heat because the heat isn't treating your skin, it's treating your hip increasing the blood flow right in your tendon tissue. When treating gluteus medius tendonitis (hip tendonitis) or any soft tissue injury, an effective therapy will increase blood flow to the injury while the joint is immobile. This increase in blood flow will accelerate the body's own ability to heal itself. The Inferno Wrap® is the most highly effective blood flow stimulation device that you will find on the market that is approved by the FDA for use in the home or hospital. Our Inferno Wrap® is made from medical-grade material - this should be as important to you as it is to us! Other products that are sold in stores are considered "consumer goods" meaning the material only needs to be as good as a sweater that you wear. Clothing articles like this don't need to meet high standards of production or materials and may include materials that irritate your skin. Since our wraps are medical-grade products registered with the FDA, they are of a higher quality and need to meet way more standards for manufacturing (ISO 10993 - bio-compatibility testing). This makes our wraps the safest product for heating treatment. Our manufacturer has spent years perfecting the wrap design to make sure you get the treatment you deserve! It's important to rest the torn tendon because our natural healing process takes time to heal completely. If you don't rest your torn tendon, your acute tendinitis can quickly turn into a chronic tendinitis injury. To repair our damaged tendon tissue quickly, our bodies will use scar tissue to fill in the tears in the tendon. If you need to rest for an extended period of time and avoid certain activities that make your pain worse, you'll be more likely to develop massive amounts of this scar tissue as a temporary healing measure. Scar tissue may plague you for weeks, months and maybe even years, depending on your level of activity and the amount of conservative treatments you have done during your rehabilitation. Scar tissue is a major problem, especially when it comes to re-injury of your tendon. When dealing with scar tissue it's always important to: listen well to your physician and if conservative treatments are recommended, remember to stick to your (daily) treatment plan using these therapies. frequent use of the Freezie Wrap® will help reduce the swelling very quickly. Much of the pain you feel will be from the swelling, and you'd be surprised how fast the pain drops off once the swelling is down. the Inferno Wrap® is a safe, electromagnetic energy device that will help reduce scar tissue and increase blood flow to the area (thereby accelerating the body's own healing process). when applied before stretching, the Inferno Wrap® will help flush the area with fresh blood. This will help improve your range of motion and prevent re-injury. It may seem hard to believe, but our Freezie Wraps® and Inferno Wraps® will assist you in recovering from your injury faster and reduce your chance of suffering from degeneration conditions (like arthritis or tendinosis) by maximizing blood flow where it's needed most and reducing swelling / inflammation induced pain. Learn more about how the Freezie Wrap® is designed to be the most effective cold compression wrap on the market today. Learn more about how the Inferno Wrap® helps with the healing process. 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