Hi, I'm Ali! I'm one of the physios from sports-injury-physio.com. Today I'm talking
about the second part of our greater trochanteric pain syndrome or our lateral hip pain or outside
hip pain series. In the first of these videos, we discussed what structures we can find anatomically
around this outside part of our hip – so, what muscles, the bursa, and the bone that's involved
around that area. And in this video, we're going to be talking about what symptoms I would be
expecting you to tell me if I was listening to you in a clinic situation for an assessment.
So, these symptoms can be varied in severity with different people. So, some people might
have all of these symptoms, and some people might only have a few of these symptoms.
So, if you have a few and you're not sure, it's worth talking it through with a professional,
and if you have all of them, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have the world's worst
problem going on in the outside of your hip. What we do know from the advent of
scans is that quite a lot of people have changes in their tendons as we get older.
They have changes in their joints as we get older. And all of these are normal findings,
and it might be that these people have had these changes that we've seen on this scan but reported
no pain for the whole of their life, and there might be people where you can see changes where it
looks dreadful and they're reporting very minimal symptoms. And some people have changes where it
looks okay – a little bit there – and they are reporting the world's worst symptoms. So, please
remember that pain and pathology don't match, and more pain doesn't mean more harm, and vice versa.
So, what we're looking at when we're asking you ‘Do you have a gluteal tendinopathy or greater
trochanteric pain syndrome?’ is we're looking for pain that's localized over this outside area of
your hip. So, if I stand up and show you where I mean – this outside area of your hip is just here,
this is your greater trochanter, which is the bony part that sticks out on your hip.
Most people have pain that's localized to that area, and sometimes that pain can refer
down the outside part of your thigh. On rare occasions, it can go down and past your knee,
can come round into the buttock or into the groin, but that's not in everybody. We'd
be looking at whether you had these pains or problems in particular times. So, on walking,
sometimes it may be just on uphill or upstairs when you're walking. It might be standing on
one leg, for example, putting your shoes and socks on if you're dressing … the other leg in
the air while you're standing on this one. You might be lying on that side or indeed lying on
the other side with your leg falling over and crossing over you as you're sleeping.
All of these things can link to these sorts of pains. And in addition, so can sitting.
And sitting might be a problem if you've sat for a long time and then you get up to start moving
again. Typically, these would occur if there has been a lifestyle change. So, a lifestyle
change might be that you've gone from doing not a lot to suddenly doing a lot of activity,
starting a new activity that you've never done before. Being pretty fit and constant,
but having a period where you've been on holiday, or you've been poorly and not been able to do it,
and then going back up to your activity again, or some sort of change in that lifestyle.
Other things can be things going on in your general health, and one of the greater examples
is this is more prevalent in females – three to one female to male – and mostly in females that
are perimenopausal or menopausal. And there'll be a video about that too in this series. So,
if you think you are suffering from any of these symptoms or they ring some bells with you,
it may be worth booking an appointment to have this assessed properly and then
move on to doing some of the things that can help modify these symptoms
or eradicate these symptoms and get you back to doing the activities that you want to do.