Chondroitin for Osteoarthritis of the Knee or Hip
This review found minimal or no benefit to the use of chondroitin for arthritis of the knee. Before we jump to conclusions… How many people in these studies with knee/hip pain was actually coming from the joint itself? The answer, of course, is that we don’t know. Degenerative joint disease = pain in clinical studies but that just isn’t always true.
For a physician that addresses soft-tissue components of injuries, how often does a knee loaded with arthritis get complete relief with some solid soft tissue approaches? I can personally say that aggressive soft tissue techniques like Graston can sometimes bring complete relief for many OA sufferers. Did we fix the OA? Of course not–but in these cases the soft tissues were the primary pain generators. So we could assume that any type of joint support would not be effective in these cases.
So, in these studies, did they rule out non-joint related pain generators? More of a rhetorical question because of course they did not.
