Hip problems from PMR

Hi Alanh, welcome to the forum.  You will get plenty of advice, support and loads os information from these great bunch of people.  I am a newbie to PMR but there are people who have a medical background and loads of experience.  Good luck on your journey.  Hang on in there and someone will be able to answer your question.  Regards  Pat

Alan, how can your GP make the statement that "he doesn't think it is requiring a joint replacement"?  He doesn't know until it is properly investigated.  If he can't offer more helpful advice than that, I would suggest you seek a second opinion, perhaps from another GP in your practice.

You haven't said what your present steroid dose is, but after 3.5 years, I'm assuming you are on doses in single figures - at that level, reducing by 1mg on a weekly basis is much faster than is recommended.  Plus self-medicating and feeling the need to keep increasing and reducing the dose means that you are either reducing by too large an amount and too soon each time.  Yo-yoing the dose like this can prove very problematic and confusing for the body.

I suggest that you ask your GP to refer you to a rheumatologist to investigate your hip pain further.  If you haven't had a DEXA scan to check for any steroid-induced thinning of your bones, you should ask for one.  You may simply find that a cortisone injection may help with your pain.  If you haven't been given a Vitamin D blood test, that should also be carried out - any deficiency can lead to pain similar to that of PMR.  Many of us have been found to be deficient, needing a short course of high dose pure Vit D3 to return our levels to normal.  The added bonus is that the extra Vit D will allow more calcium from your diet to be absorbed into your bones for further protection.

Yes I have. The hip pain turned out to be bursitis which with a little physio help is gradually clearing. The physio recommended rolling a small rubber ball around the affected area, creaming the whole of the outside of the leg plus exercises. Also had some ultra sound and some kind of massage. Good luck with it. It is really painful but not related to the PMR.

Frankly I'm not surprised you are still on pred - reducing 1mg per week is far too fast to find the right dose and you are continually allowing the symptoms to resurface instead of finding the right lowest dose that manages the symptoms and then staying there never allowing the inflammation to flare. 1mg a month might have worked better but 1mg a week doesn't ever let your body settle down and know where it is at.

Like MrsO - I'm always amazed at these GPs who can see through skin. There's so many - I really can't imagine why hospitals bother to use x-rays at all. It all depends how many you have had in the past - or maybe you fly to the USA every week? My consultant medical physicist husband says to ask the GP to give you an odds-ratio of the risk of you developing cancer from a single hip x-ray compared to not having one! It isn't up to a GP to make that sort of decision, the radiation protection experts calculate that sort of risk and say if a patient is OK to have simple x-rays - its peanuts compared to radiotherapy and said husband has been there and they still give him x-rays when they are required. The GP is right in the sense an x-ray should only be done when required - but he isn't an orthopaedic expert. He is a general practitioner.

However - my tip would be trochanteric bursitis or possibly even piriformis syndrome if the pain is at the centre back and into the buttock and actually that CAN  be associated with PMR. PMR often is accompanied by shoulder and hip bursitis which responds to the higher doses of pred and as you reduce it surfaces again. Sometimes it gets so bad that more than oral pred and physio is needed and local cortisone injections deal with it very well - that achieves a high local steroid level and combats this localised inflammation without affecting the rest of the body.

I've had it, physio didn't do anything but 2 cortisone shots about 3 months apart got rid of it for about 2 years, it started again and a single shot did the job.