Hi, I’m Michael Torres
My joints have been a problem my whole life.
I was the kid who could bend his fingers back to his wrist and thought it was a great party trick. I was also the kid who rolled an ankle every couple of months, whose knees ached after every growth spurt, and who kept getting told it was growing pains right up until the age where growing pains stopped being a plausible answer.
It never really went away. My twenties were sprains and a shoulder that came out of its socket twice. Somewhere in my thirties the pain stopped arriving in episodes and settled in as a background fact — something I planned my week around rather than something that happened to me. In my early fifties an orthopedist finally put a name on part of it: moderate osteoarthritis in both knees. The right one was replaced a couple of years ago, which is its own long story and a fair amount of what I’ve written here.
So I’m not here as an expert. I’m here as somebody with five decades of practice at this, who has bought, borrowed, returned, and given away an enormous amount of stuff trying to make an ordinary day hurt less.
What this site actually is
Joint Health FAQ is a record of what has helped.
Some of it is mine — the brace I actually wear, the mat I stand on at my desk, the pillow arrangement that finally let me sleep through the night. Some of it belongs to other people: my sister-in-law, who has rheumatoid arthritis in her hands and has opinions about every jar opener ever made; a couple of guys from my cycling group; readers who write in to tell me a thing worked, or didn’t.
What it is not is medical advice. I’m not a doctor, a physical therapist, a trainer, or a nutritionist. I have no clinical training and I have never treated anybody. When you read “this helped” on this site, read it as one person’s experience — not as a recommendation about your body, because I don’t know anything about your body. The person who does is your doctor.
How I decide what to recommend
Most of what I write about eventually links to Amazon, and I want to be straight about how those recommendations work, because plenty of sites aren’t.
Everything I mention falls into one of three buckets, and I tell you which one:
- I use it. I bought it with my own money, I’ve used it long enough to have a real opinion, and I’ll tell you what I don’t like about it as well as what I do.
- Somebody I know uses it. Not me, but a real person whose experience I trust and whose situation I can describe to you. Their joints aren’t mine, and they might not be yours either.
- I haven’t used it. Some things are worth knowing about anyway — because of what owners consistently report, or because it’s simply the standard answer to a common problem. When that’s the case I say so plainly, and I tell you why it’s on the list regardless.
What I won’t do is tell you that something treats a condition. A knee sleeve is not a treatment for arthritis. A supplement is not a cure. The most I can honestly claim about any of it is what changed for one specific person — that I could get down my own stairs in the morning without holding the rail, or that my sister-in-law can open a jar again without asking anybody. That is a much smaller claim than most joint-health sites make. It’s also the only one I can actually back up.
Why I bother
Because the internet was no help to me for about twenty years.
Joint content online is mostly two things: fear, and sales. Here’s the frightening thing your pain might mean; here’s the pill that fixes it. Neither is much use when you’re standing in your kitchen at six in the morning waiting for your knees to loosen up enough to walk normally.
What I wanted back then, and never found, was somebody a few years further down the same road who would just tell me what they’d tried. That’s what I’m attempting to be here.
The rest of it
I live in the Pacific Northwest, where the trails are worth the weather and the weather is hard on my knees. I hike slower than I used to, on a knee that is younger than the rest of me, and I’ve made my peace with that. I ride a bike most days, because it’s the one thing that has never made anything worse.
If something here helps, I’d genuinely like to hear about it. If something here didn’t, I’d like to hear about that even more — tell me and I’ll fix it.
— Michael Torres
Not medical advice. I have no medical training. Nothing here is a diagnosis or a treatment plan. If your pain is new, severe, getting worse, or comes with swelling, fever, redness, or numbness, please see a doctor rather than a website.