If you live with inflammatory bowel disease — whether Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis — and you also deal with joint pain, stiffness, or swelling, you are not imagining a connection. IBD-associated arthropathy is one of the most common extraintestinal manifestations of IBD, affecting anywhere from 17 to 39 percent of patients depending on the classification used.

Post-streptococcal reactive arthritis catches most people completely off guard. You had a strep throat — you took the antibiotics, you felt better — and then weeks later your joints started swelling. The infection was treated, the bacteria were gone, and yet here you are with arthritis that no one seems to have a clear answer for.

Most people who reach a rheumatologist with Q fever arthritis have already been through a confusing stretch of time. The joint pain appeared weeks or months after what seemed like a bad flu, an unexplained fever, or an exposure to farm animals or soil.

If you have landed here, there is a good chance you already know the specific misery of piriformis syndrome: a deep, aching or burning pain buried in the buttock, sometimes shooting down the back of the leg, worse after sitting on a hard chair, driving, or climbing stairs.

If you've been dealing with nagging pain deep in the sit-bone area, or a hamstring that flares up every time you increase your running volume, you've probably already heard the standard advice: rest, stretch gently, strengthen slowly, be patient.

If you've been told your sacroiliac joint is "just inflamed" or "out of alignment" and left with a stretching sheet and a follow-up appointment in six weeks, you're not imagining that something is missing.

Most advice after a proximal hamstring tendon avulsion sounds the same no matter who you are: rest, physical therapy, gradual loading, maybe surgery if the tear is severe enough. That advice isn't wrong, but it's built for an average person who doesn't exist.

A biceps femoris avulsion fracture is not just "a pulled hamstring." It means a piece of bone, usually at or near the ischial tuberosity, has been torn away along with the tendon that should be anchoring it.