The purpose of this study is to compare a commonly offered clinical approach of a series of intra-articular steroid injections to an orthopaedic manual physical therapy (OMPT) approach consisting of manually applied passive movement and reinforcing exercise for the treatment of osteoarthritis of the knee (knee OA). A second purpose is to validate a clinical prediction rule (CPR) for patients unlikely to respond to the orthopaedic manual physical therapy approach in a pre-planned secondary analysis of data from the randomized clinical trial.~Aim 1: To see if there is a significant difference in pain and function lasting out to 1 year for patients that receive a clinical approach consisting of a series of intra-articular steroid injections compared to those that receive a clinical approach consisting of orthopaedic manual physical therapy.~Aim 2: To validate a clinical prediction rule of characteristics identified in a previous preliminary study that predicted which patients with knee OA would be unlikely to respond to OMPT.
The purpose of this study is to compare an orthopaedic manual physical therapy (OMPT) to corticosteroid injection for the management of knee osteoarthritis.