Knee and lower back pain are common and costly ailments that can result from several causes, including injury, being overweight, or simply muscle stress and strain. Sufferers who experience knee or lower back discomfort and the many difficulties their pain may cause should first look into this effective solution. These over-the-counter products are fairly inexpensive and can be found at various retail locations, including drugstores. Most of us never consider that the back pain we are experiencing might be a form of arthritis. In fact, the pain caused by lumbar facet arthritis can be extremely severe and should be addressed by a physician, specifically a pain medicine specialist.

There are several treatment options for knee and lower back pain, but they can be expensive. Back pain can be a sign of a serious medical problem, although this is not most frequently the underlying cause:

    * Typical warning signs of a potentially life-threatening problem are bowel and/or bladder incontinence or progressive weakness in the legs.

    * Severe back pain (such as pain that is bad enough to interrupt sleep) that occurs with other signs of severe illness (e.g. fever, unexplained weight loss) may also indicate a serious underlying medical condition.

    * Back pain that occurs after a trauma, such as a car accident or fall may indicate a bone fracture or other injury.

    * Back pain in individuals with medical conditions that put them at high risk for a spinal fracture, such as osteoporosis or multiple myeloma, also warrants prompt medical attention.

    * Back pain in individuals with a history of cancer (especially cancers known to spread to the spine like breast, lung and prostate cancer) should be evaluated to rule out metastatic disease of the spine.

A few observational studies suggest that two conditions to which back pain is often attributed, lumbar disc herniation and degenerative disc disease may not be more prevalent among those in pain than among the general population, and that the mechanisms by which these conditions might cause pain are not known.

If the lumbar facet joints are not aligned correctly, the cartilage surrounding the joints can wear away. This causes the joints to press together bone to bone, which often results in the development of arthritis. If you are diagnosed with lumbar facet arthritis, there are a number of different treatment options available to you. One nonsurgical option that has helped many lumbar facet arthritis patients is radiofrequency ablation, a procedure that uses an electrical current produced by a radio wave to decrease the pain.