Calgary's Active Hip Centre provides relief for hip pain sufferers

CALGARY -

The Active Hip Centre focuses on helping patients from 20 to 50 years old who live active lives with ongoing chronic, non-arthritic hip pain.

The centre's goal is to reduce pain and avoid potential surgery in the future.

David Lindsay is the co-founder of the centre and a physiotherapist. He says people have coaches for all kinds of activities in their lives, but when it comes to the simple task of walking, we're on our own.

"The interesting thing is because we have so many muscles around our hip – more than anywhere else in our body – they're there for a reason," said Lindsay.

"Part of that is because stuck on the end of our thigh bone, we've got this beautiful round ball about the size of a golf ball. Every step we take, we're balancing on a golf ball – and that's hard, and it requires an unbelievable coordination pattern that has no coach or instruction manual."

Lindsay says the hip is different than every other joint in the body due to its function of bearing weight and propelling the body forward 10,000 times per day.

More muscles act on the hip joint than any other joint in the body.

"We take (walking) for granted because we've been doing it since (we were toddlers)," said Lindsay. "No coach, no instruction manual, we assume we're all doing it perfectly weight and guess what, we might not be."

"That's one of the key elements we look at here, is how do people walk – and in almost all instances, it can be better."

Torri Barnes is a physiotherapist at the centre who says she sees about six patients a day.

"Every person walking, if we took 100 people into the clinic, 80 per cent would have hip pain, and you can tell based on just the way they walk," she said.

Barnes said when patients come in, they're assessed and then educated about what's going on with their hips. She says it's key to get people to understand why their hips are hurting before they start an exercise program to strengthen the surrounding muscles.

"The exercises are very specific," said Barnes. "We start at the deepest layer of muscle tissue and typically have to work outwards, focusing on imbalances and compensation, but the goal is for that to then show up in the gait patterns."

Dr. Kelly Johnston specializes in hip surgery and says there are many benefits to strengthening hip muscles. 

"It's prehab, essentially," said Johnston. "It's a prehabilitiation situation, so the patient can come for surgery and benefit maximally from surgery. What we don't want is patients sitting on wait lists and deconditioning and getting even worse to the point where they're not necessarily able to benefit maximally from surgery."

Johnston says many people suffer years of pain thinking they need surgery, but many times after eventually seeing a specialist, they learn they are not candidates for a surgical procedure.

This is where the Active Hip Centre can help, by getting people's hips in shape and getting them off wait lists so surgeons can focus on those in need.

"This clinic will help me see patients that have maximized non-operative strategies, and they're at a point now where surgery is required," said Johnston. "They're going to benefit maximally from surgery because they have strengthened all the muscles around the joint."

Jennifer Aubin is an ultra marathon runner who says hip pain forced her to stop running four and a half years ago.

"I was waking up a couple times a night with the pain," said Aubin. "There was deep pain within my hip, lower back, glutes, I was thinking, 'I needed a hip replacement.'"

She's now completed six months of therapy at Active Hip, thought Aubin only visited her physiotherapist five times in that period. She was prescribed exercises that she did at home, and says the pain has decreased.

"I get to start running again soon so I'm really excited about that," said Aubin. "They're going to make me start slow, but I'm going to listen to them because they know what they're talking about and I'm unconfident I can get there because of them."

To learn more about the Active Hip Centre you can visit its website.