Why Your Hip Hurts (Each Hip Pain Explained) + What To Do
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Not all hip pain is created equal, which means it’s important to know what’s actually going on in order to know how to fix it:
🎵 If you wanna know why it hurts you so… 🎵
Let’s do a run-down, part by part:
- Front hip pain from hip flexors: pain down the front, worse when lifting your knee. Usually hip flexor strain or tightness; helped by progressive strengthening.
- Front hip pain from hernia: pain at crease of leg, worse with bending, lifting, coughing, or bearing down; bulge present that worsens when standing/coughing and reduces lying down. See a doctor for this one.
- Front hip pain from referred pain: dull, hard-to-pinpoint pain without lump; coughing/sneezing doesn’t worsen it; often referred from lower back or pelvic joints. He (a chiropractor) says to see a chiropractor. We (10almonds, who like evidence-based healthcare) suggest instead to see a physio.
- Hip socket pinching pain: sharp pinch when bending knee past 90°, worse with inward rotation; structures inside hip joint affected. This is usually arthritis in middle age or older, but can be excess bone growth in youth or a labral tear at any age. Remedies vary depending on which, so see a physio to be sure.
- Outer hip pain: pain over bony lump or nearby muscles, common after activity increase, especially in women over 40; often sore to lie on at night. This one’s typically caused by tendonitis of the outer gluteal muscles; you can test it by standing on the painful leg for 30 seconds. Weak glutes are a contributing factor, so strengthening helps. He doesn’t mention this, but we’d also suggest taking care of any chronic inflammation, by adopting an anti-inflammatory diet if you haven’t already.
- Snapping hip: hip snaps/flicks with movement; usually the iliotibial band rubbing over hip. Tension release is what’s needed; see a physio.
- Back of hip pain: deep glute ache, worse with sitting or sport, sore when pressing or stretching. This may well be be piriformis syndrome (tight piriformis muscle compressing the sciatic nerve), which can cause numbness or pins and needles down leg. Physio can help with this, as can well-instructed yoga or Pilates.
- Hip pain from lower back: pain in lower back plus hip, which gets worse with movements like bending, standing, or reaching forward—strengthening glutes will take the strain off it.
- “Sitting bone” pain: pain at bony seat area of the pelvis is often a matter of hamstring tendon strain where it meets the pelvis; progressive hamstring strengthening needed
- If unsure: see a physio, but honestly, 80% of the time the answer is going to be strengthening your glutes.
For more on all of this plus visual illustrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like this book we reviewed a little while back:
11 Minutes to Pain-Free Hips – by Melinda Wright
Take care!
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Doctor Explains: 19 Signs Of Hyperthyroidism
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We’ve talked before about the signs of hypothyroidism, but what about when it’s the other way, and the thyroid becomes overactive? Dr. Siobhan Deshauer explains:
Things to watch out for
Paradoxically, there is some overlap with the signs of an underactive thyroid (e.g. goiter, thin hair), but there are many points of distinction:
- Proptosis: bulging of the eyes due to swelling behind them.
- Double vision: caused by misalignment from swollen eye muscles.
- Periorbital edema: swelling around the eyes or eyelids.
- Lid retraction & lag: visible white above the iris when face is relaxed; upper eyelid lags behind when following a moving object downward.
- Hyperdynamic circulation: visible pulse in the neck due to increased cardiac output.
- Goiter: enlarged thyroid gland visible or moving during swallowing.
- Pemberton’s sign: redness and vein bulging in neck/face when arms are raised, due to venous compression.
- Onycholysis: fingernails separating from the nail bed, often starting with the ring finger.
- Thyroid acropachy: clubbing and thickening of fingers with abnormal bone growth.
- Tremor: fine shaking of hands, especially when held out.
- Pretibial myxedema: waxy, swollen skin on shins with an orange-peel texture.
- Elephantiasis: severe skin thickening on lower limbs due to blocked lymph drainage.
- Unintentional weight loss: despite increased appetite due to high metabolic rate.
- Heat intolerance: overheating and excessive sweating with warm, moist skin.
- Cardiac arrhythmia: irregular heartbeat and palpitations.
- Thin, oily hair: hair grows fast but becomes fine, fragile, and falls out.
- Osteoporosis: bone density loss; of course this can’t be seen from the outside by eye, but can be seen on a scan.
- Anxiety and irritability: new or worsened anxiety-like symptoms, insomnia, panic attacks.
- Cognitive changes: specifically, not good ones—trouble focusing in young people; confusion in older adults, mimicking dementia.
For more on all of these plus visual illustrations where applicable, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Doctor Explains: 15 Signs Of Hypothyroidism
Take care!
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NAD⁺ vs Long COVID!
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Before we get to talking about long COVID, a word on nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (or NAD+ to its friends) itself.
It’s most well-known in the context of healthy aging, and that’s because:
- NAD+ levels decline with age
- The aforementioned decline is a causal factor in aging
- Boosting NAD+ levels can, thus, slow aging
Learn more: Therapeutic Potential of NAD-Boosting Molecules: The In Vivo Evidence
There are actually also other NAD-boosting molecules besides NAD itself and its precursors. For example, the liver will not produce NADᐩ unless it has aminocarboxymuconate-semialdehyde decarboxylase (or “ACMSD”, to its friends), which limits the production of NADᐩ. Why, you ask? The theory is that it is a kind of evolutionary conservativism, much like not lighting a fire without the ability to put it out. In any case, taking ACMSD-blockers will thus result in an increased endogenous production of NADᐩ.
You can read about this here: De novo NAD+ synthesis enhances mitochondrial function and improves health
For these reasons, NAD+ is one of Dr. Greger’s Anti-Aging Eight ← we wrote about NAD+ here
But what about NAD+ vs long COVID?
The latest science
Researchers (Dr. Edmarie Guzmán-Vélez et al.) investigated how boosting NAD⁺ with nicotinamide riboside (NR) can ease long-COVID symptoms such as brain fog, fatigue, executive dysfunction, and sleep problems.
How they tested it:
- They gave one group 2,000 mg/day NR for 20 weeks
- They gave the other group a placebo for 10 weeks before switching to NR for the next 10 weeks.
- They measured NAD⁺ levels and tested fatigue, executive function, sleep, and mood at baseline, week 10, and week 20.
As for how that went:
❝In post-hoc exploratory analysis, examining within-group changes during 5 and 10 weeks of NR intake by grouping all participants during the first 10 weeks of the NR phase, there were significant differences from baseline after 10 weeks of NR in executive functioning, fatigue severity, sleep quality, and symptoms of depression❞
(specifically: the “significant differences” were significant improvements)
Read the paper in full: Effects of nicotinamide riboside on NAD+ levels, cognition, and symptom recovery in long-COVID: a randomized controlled trial
If you’d like to try more things like this, then consider: 12 Most Powerful Supplements and Foods to Increase Energy & Slow Down Aging
And definitely check out: What Can Be Done About Long COVID?
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents – by Dr. Lindsay Gibson
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Not everyone had the best of parents, and the harm done can last well beyond childhood. This book looks at healing that.
Dr. Gibson talks about four main kinds of “difficult” parents, though of course they can overlap:
- The emotional parent, with their unpredictable outbursts
- The driven parent, with their projected perfectionism
- The passive parent, with their disinterest and unreliability
- The rejecting parent, with their unavailability and insults
For all of them, it’s common that nothing we could do was ever good enough, and that leaves a deep scar. To add to it, the unfavorable dynamic often persists in adult life, assuming everyone involved is still alive and in contact.
So, what to do about it? Dr. Gibson advocates for first getting a good understanding of what wasn’t right/normal/healthy, because it’s easy for a lot of us to normalize the only thing we’ve ever known. Then, beyond merely noting that no child deserved that lack of compassion, moving on to pick up the broken pieces one by one, and address each in turn.
The style of the book is anecdote-heavy (case studies, either anonymized or synthesized per common patterns) in a way that will probably be all-too-relatable to a lot of readers (assuming that if you buy this book, it’s for a reason), science-moderate (references peppered into the text; three pages of bibliography), and practicality-dense—that is to say, there are lots of clear usable examples, there are self-assessment questionnaires, there are worksheets for now making progress forward, and so forth.
Bottom line: if one or more of the parent types above strikes a chord with you, there’s a good chance you could benefit from this book.
Click here to check out Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and rebuild yourself!
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Are Collagen Molecules Too Big To Be Absorbed?
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small 😎
❝I read your article about collagen, but I heard collagen molecules are too large to be absorbed, so supplementing with collagen is basically useless, have I been misled?❞
Great question! And the answer is… Nuanced.
Firstly let’s note: absorbed where? The gut (oral supplementation), or the skin (topical application)?
You said “supplementing”, so probably you’re thinking about the gut; we’ll give good attention to that, but for the sake of being methodical, let’s briefly talk about the skin and products with topical collagen that’s applied externally:
Yes, collagen molecules are absolutely huge and cannot be absorbed by the skin. Not only that, but the epidermis (the outer part of your skin) is not where collagen synthesis happens, so this is a bit like trying to fix a structural problem in your house by flinging mud at it from the outside. The mud may have the same minerals that are needed, but it’s just going to sit on the outside of your house until it gets washed off.
So it is with topical collagen creams, masks, etc. They can give a brief “filler” effect at best, but they’re not doing anything for your actual skin and will just get washed off when you wash.
Now, about hydrolysed collagen peptides
This term means that the huge collagen molecules have been broken down into little bits. These now are are small enough to get absorbed.
When it comes to topical treatments, there is currently no good science that we could find to show that they actually help, though, perhaps because while they’re small enough to get absorbed, most aren’t. We can’t know for sure yet though, as studies that do exists are usually not only funded by the beauty company making the tropical product, but also, tiny and often methodologically weak.
Here’s an example; it’s a tiny (n=22) study, funded by the beauty company whose product is being tested, with no control group, the main outcomes were subjective satisfaction, skin roughness measurement (that would be affected by anything physically smoothing over the top of the skin), and then more technical measures that while cited as improvements, have numbers that look like:
❝Furthermore, the skin surface elasticity (total recovery/total elongation; gross elasticity (R2)) increased from 0.81 ± 0.03 to 0.83 ± 0.03❞
Read in full: Effect of a Topical Collagen Tripeptide on Antiaging and Inhibition of Glycation of the Skin: A Pilot Study
Perhaps better, more conclusive studies will be conducted and their results will vindicate the use of topical collagen treatments, but the current state of science is, if being honest about things, “we don’t know”.
About that “subjective satisfaction” thing though—it’s worth noting that that there are no known adverse side effects (beyond rare adverse reactions, usually to some other ingredient), so if you have a topical collagen treatment that you enjoy using, don’t let us stop you.
Now, about the gut
Collagen molecules are, once again, far too large to be absorbed by the gut, too. Hydrolyzed collagen peptides are, once again, the answer.
And this time, not only are they small enough to be absorbed, but also, there is a lot of science to indicate that it really does meaningfully improve bone density, alleviate symptoms of arthritis, and so forth.
And as for its benefits for the skin from the inside, it’s hard to know whether it’s getting there or not, but what we can know is that collagen synthesis is increased systemwide in people who take hydrolysed collagen peptide supplements in the recommended dosage range of 5–20g/day, and that many measurable signs of skin aging are meaningfully reversed (much more so than the paltry numbers in the topical treatment study we linked above):
This is what we wrote about in the article you read, which for convenience we’ll link again here: We Are Such Stuff As Fish Are Made Of ← we also link to where you can get good quality hydrolyzed collagen peptides.
Vegan/Vegetarian?
At present, only animals make collagen. We say “at present” not because it’s likely that plants or fungi are likely to start doing it soon, but rather, because lab-made stuff is often around the corner.
For now, however, all sources of collagen are from animals.
So, what to do if vegan/vegetarian?
The best thing to do is to simply do like those animals did, and include in your diet plenty of the ingredients required for your body to make collagen internally.
As for what they are, check out: The Best Foods For Collagen Production
Enjoy!
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Fully Present – by Dr. Susan Smalley and Diana Winston
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“The Science and the Art of…” tends to be a bit of a fuzzy obfuscation, but in this case, it’s accurate, especially in this presentation. The authors are, indeed, a scientist and an artist—and both practitioners, meeting in the middle.
As such, we get the clinical insights of a researcher and professor of psychiatry, and the grounded-yet-spiritual insights of an erstwhile Buddhist nun.
While the book is pop psychology in essence, the format is much more that of a textbook than a self-help book. Will it be useful for helping yourself anyway, though? Yes, absolutely, if you apply the information contained within.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that a textbook format makes it dry, though—the writing is very compelling, and you’ll find yourself turning pages eagerly. There’s no time like the present, after all!
Bottom line: if you find the scientific evidence-base for the usefulness of mindfulness appealing, but find a lot of guides a little fluffy, this one is perfectly balanced—and very well written, too.
Click here to check out Fully Present, bring yourself into the moment, always!
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Treating Knee Arthritis Without Surgery
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
There are a lot of possible ways, and some have rather more evidence than others:
Here’s what works
Let’s start at the top:
- Exercise and physiotherapy: the strongest evidence overall, as strengthening your muscles around the knee reduces pain and improves function more reliably than any medication.
- In the category of exercise, it’s important to keep moving but avoid or adjust activities that significantly worsen your knee pain to reduce joint stress.
- Weight loss: one of the most powerful interventions if applicable, with even modest loss significantly reducing joint load and pain, especially when using stairs, where forces are greatly increased.
- NSAIDs (over-the-counter or prescription): among the most effective medications for arthritic pain relief, but limited by side effects with long-term use.
- Injections (corticosteroids): effective for short-term relief during flare-ups, though benefits typically fade over weeks to a few months.
- Braces and orthotics: moderately effective, especially if your arthritis affects a specific compartment of your knee.
- Topical treatments: creams or gels (anti-inflammatories, anesthetics, or CBD) for localized relief with fewer systemic effects, though generally less powerful than oral medications.
- Diet changes: supportive rather than primary treatment, but can help reduce inflammation and contribute to weight loss.
- Acetaminophen: safer for the kidneys, but less effective than NSAIDs for most people with knee arthritis, as well as being hepatotoxic (poisons your liver) if overused.
- Hyaluronic acid injections: mixed evidence, with some people benefiting but overall effects being modest and inconsistent.
Some other things discussed that don’t fit well into a ranking from best to worst:
- They made the strange choice to lump “magnets, copper, or red light therapy” together as one item having “weak evidence though placebo might help”, when one of those 3 things is not like the others!
- Red light therapy is very well-evidenced for helping a good number of health things; it’s simply that arthritis isn’t one of them, and it’s a bit strange that they even brought it up, as it’s not a health claim we’ve seen made for it in the wild. It would be like taking time in the video to say that soap won’t help against arthritis—it’s technically a true statement, but why mention it at all?
- They did a similar thing with supplements, saying “benefits vary and evidence is mixed”, but it rather makes a difference which supplement! So, in the “learn more” section below, we’ve linked an article that talks about 5 supplements that do have good evidence vs arthritis.
For the video itself meanwhile, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Five Supplements That Actually Work Vs Arthritis
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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- Exercise and physiotherapy: the strongest evidence overall, as strengthening your muscles around the knee reduces pain and improves function more reliably than any medication.
