Bursitis Isn’t the Problem—It’s the Alarm

I recently had a session with a client who showed up kind of bummed after going to visit her doctor about some knee pain she had been experiencing.  

“My doctor said it’s bursitis”, she said solemnly. 

Why was she so dejected about this? Well, her doctor told her that sometimes bursitis just happens when you get older and you just have to accept it, and there was really nothing to be done about it other than stop doing all the things and take their latest medication to take your mind off of the pain. 

I’m sorry, but this is the kind of medical “care” that drove us to open the best Performance Physical Therapy clinic in Gainesville FL in the first place. 

So today we are going to shed a little light on the vague diagnosis of “bursitis” and what we/you can actually do about it. 

So what exactly is a bursa, and why does it get irritated in the first place? 

A bursa is a small, fluid-filled sac that acts as a cushion between bones, tendons, and muscles. Think of it like a tiny water balloon that helps reduce friction where things rub together. You’ve got them all over your body—shoulders, hips, knees, elbows.

When everything is moving well, your bursae stay quiet, rolling back and forth along the sliding tissues. But when movement becomes inefficient or imbalanced, they can experience overcompression, become inflamed and start screaming. This is bursitis.

Whether it’s due to repetitive motion, poor mechanics, muscle imbalances, or joint restrictions, bursitis is rarely a “random” injury. It’s often your body’s way of telling you that something upstream or downstream isn’t working as it should. And there is plenty to be done for it besides medication and rest, which only puts your symptoms on pause. 

That’s where good physical therapy comes in. At Forge Performance PT, we don’t just treat the symptoms—we investigate why the tissue got irritated in the first place. Was it limited mobility? Poor load distribution? A movement pattern compensating for weakness or stiffness elsewhere?

By addressing the root cause and restoring efficient movement, we help you calm the inflammation—and keep it from coming back. Once the normal mechanics are restored to the joint, the compression on the bursa is relieved, and the inflammation dissipates. And before you know it, you are back to doing the things that make life worth living. Painfree. 

If you’ve been dealing with persistent bursitis, don’t settle for the lifetime sentence of pain and dysfunction that others try to feed you. Let’s figure out the why together. Hit that link below and set up a Discovery Call with us where we can talk about YOUR specific problems and how we can help you with them!