Inflammation
The body’s response to injury or irritation — helpful in the short term, a problem when it lingers.
What the word means
Inflammation is the coordinated response your body mounts whenever a tissue is injured, infected, or chronically irritated. Physicians have described it the same way for thousands of years by four signs: redness, warmth, swelling, and pain, often with a fifth sign of lost function (you can’t fully bend a swollen knee or grip with an inflamed wrist). Those signs aren’t the problem; they’re the body’s toolkit for dealing with the problem.
Acute versus chronic inflammation
Acute inflammation is short-lived and generally useful. When you roll an ankle, blood vessels dilate, specialized cells arrive within minutes to clean up damaged tissue, and the area warms up and swells. Over days to a few weeks, the swelling resolves and repair cells move in to rebuild. This is the kind of inflammation you want.
Chronic inflammation is low-grade but persistent. Instead of finishing the cleanup and handing off to repair cells, the inflammatory process keeps running. Chronic inflammation is the central mechanism behind osteoarthritis flares, tendinopathy, bursitis, and rheumatoid arthritis. The goal of most non-operative orthopedic treatments is to break this cycle without shutting down normal healing.
Why you hear the word everywhere
Because almost every orthopedic diagnosis has some inflammatory component, you’ll see the word on nearly every page of this website. A rotator cuff tendon that’s been rubbing for years is inflamed. A knee with osteoarthritis flares in and out of inflammation. A bursa (fluid sac) over the hip becomes inflamed when it’s pinched by an overlying tendon. The specific tissue changes, but the biology is similar.
How we address inflammation at OSI
- Activity modification and rest — the cheapest and often the most effective anti-inflammatory intervention.
- Ice and elevation for acute injuries — narrows local blood flow and limits swelling.
- NSAIDs (ibuprofen, naproxen, meloxicam) — block the enzymes that produce inflammatory signals.
- Corticosteroid injections — a concentrated anti-inflammatory dose placed directly in the painful joint, bursa, or tendon sheath.
- Physical therapy — restores motion and strength so the tissue isn’t re-irritated with every movement.
- Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) — a different approach that aims to stimulate healing rather than suppress inflammation.
When “anti-inflammatory” isn’t the goal
Not all tendon pain is inflammatory. Long-standing tennis elbow, Achilles, or patellar tendon pain often isn’t driven by inflammation at all — it’s a failure of the tendon to heal, called tendinopathy. For those problems, loading the tendon the right way (eccentric exercise) or kickstarting biology with PRP tends to work better than an anti-inflammatory. One of the reasons we examine the tendon before treating it is to tell the difference.