Your musculoskeletal system is complex. Your bones and joints work together with your muscles, tendons, ligaments, and other soft tissues to help you move throughout life.
When you’re feeling good, your musculoskeletal system supports your body weight and gives you freedom of motion to participate in your favorite activities. But all too often, injury and disease inhibit your mobility.
Musculoskeletal damage — like sports injuries, arthritis, and back pain — can have a profound impact on your quality of life, and these conditions aren’t always simple to diagnose and treat. That’s why our team at Manhattan Orthopedics specializes in cutting-edge diagnostic imaging technology.
Our team has years of experience diagnosing and treating a wide range of musculoskeletal conditions, from adolescents with fractures and sprains to seniors with arthritis. We believe the best treatment starts with an accurate diagnosis, and that’s why we bring the latest diagnostic technology to our patients.
When you suffer an injury or you experience musculoskeletal pain, we start with a full physical exam. We review your medical history, any existing X-rays or additional diagnostic images from other doctors, and ask about your symptoms.
We often narrow down the possible diagnoses with your physical exam, but diagnostic imaging gives our surgical team an inside look at what’s going on in your body. With diagnostic technology, we can assess the extent of your condition so we can tailor your treatment to give the best possible results.
X-rays might be the best-known type of diagnostic imaging. X-ray technology takes images of the inside of your body in shades of black and white, but it isn’t right for every condition. It works best on hard materials, like bone, and it doesn’t work as well for muscles and other soft tissues.
At Manhattan Orthopedics, you’ll find diagnostic technology for bone fractures, soft tissue injury, and connective tissue problems.
We use diagnostic ultrasound (also called ultrasonography) to assess soft tissue injuries and pain. Ultrasound technology works by sending sound waves through your body and creating an image from the waves.
When we do an ultrasound, we place gel on the area and then pass a transducer over it to assess a certain muscle, tendon, or ligament. The procedure is painless and gives us the ability to determine a course of treatment. Ultrasonography can also be used as part of treatment, because the imaging can help guide injections to increase accuracy.
If you have a fracture or another type of bone injury, we may order an X-ray. We’re proud to have a state-of-the-art radiology suite that helps our team get high-quality X-ray images, better visualizations, and reduced X-ray exposure for patients.
X-ray imaging is also painless. Depending on the area of your body being X-rayed, you might lie down or stand for your imaging test. We position your body, and you remain still while the images are captured. Once the test is done, we review the images to evaluate the extent of your injury.
Joint pain is another common musculoskeletal condition with many possible causes, so it takes some sleuthing work to reach a diagnosis. If our team identifies joint pain without a clear cause, we may order a diagnostic fluoroscopy to better assess your joint.
Fluoroscopy is a minimally invasive procedure that combines X-ray imaging with an iodine injection. Our team uses fluoroscopy to diagnose shoulder, knee, and other joints. Fluoroscopy can also be used during surgery to make the procedure less invasive.
Do you have musculoskeletal pain? Relief starts with getting a diagnosis. Schedule an appointment at one of our Manhattan Orthopedics offices over the phone or book online today.
