[QUOTE=Pocket Pony;8289064]
Aw, thanks. I got the order for a bone scan but it is only lower back. I went back and asked the ortho (via his assistant) to include the hips. I mean, if they are injecting me with dye and taking a picture and I’m complaining of multiple symptoms, doesn’t it make sense to get a picture of everything I’m complaining of?! I’m waiting to hear back.[/QUOTE]
Before you guys sign yourselves up for more iatrogenic (medically caused) mayhem, disability and torture than Nature is meting out to you to start with, PLEASE read Dr. Nortin Hadler’s book, Stabbed In The Back.
He’s the big back-wonk down at Chapel Hill, and an editor of the journal Spine. According to the studies he cites (and they are legion), the only surgery that provides long-term benefit for actual arthritic hip degeneration is THR, which most people wait too long to do. The other stuff has nothing outcome-based to recommend it. Please remember the plural of anecdotes is not “data.” And based on the anecdotes in this thread, I’ll PASS!
The DATA show that imaging studies of all kinds beyond an x-ray are nearly useless to dignose and cure pain of lumbar and SI origin, ubiquitous in the population, due to the unfortunate fact that nearly all of it is idiopathic–unrelated to any of the pathoanatomical “unsoundnesses” that might be uncovered. Which means in layman’s terms, 4 surgeries later your pain is the same if not WORSE, and the only thing that’s “cured” is your surgeon’s boat mortgage. Because he was “shooting” at a “target” that’s obscure, if not invisible.
The only thing that makes much sense (as per evidence-based medicine) is to do enough Dx to eliminate degenerative hip disease, tumors, and infections from the picture. Barring those, quite frankly Western allopathic medicine has not-one-THING better to offer you for the pain than 2 aspirins every 4 hours or as needed. Nothing else has proven to work better, nothing else has shown a clear benefit, nothing else has a superior risk/benefit relationship. Nothing. Not PT, not surgery, not chiro, or needling, girdling, or exercise.
That’s what the data shows, gathered over 35 years in all Western countries.
Most of the time it isn’t your hip hurting. It’s something coming from one of a major handful of spinal nerves and the muscles they run through in your lumbar-sacral region, which is like looking for a needle in the haystack. And there IS no cure. If they SAY there is, they’re LYING.
I was just as glad to read that gimping around the yard on an aspirin does about as much good as anything. 
The other thing nobody wants to hear is that by age 40-55, most of us who’ve lived a life of athletic excess are going to be about as sound as our 20-year-old former Prelim. horses. Not much you can do about it except compare aches when you get together for drinks. Extra points when you join the Hip Replacement Club–then you can go back foxhunting! 
