You ring your mum on a Sunday. She sounds fine. Then, near the end, almost as an afterthought, she mentions her hip has been “playing up a bit.” She changes the subject before you can ask a second question.
If you’re somewhere between 40 and 65 and your parents retired inland, you know this call. They moved to the Darling Downs or somewhere quieter for the space and the price, and now the distance that felt manageable at Christmas feels very different when something starts going wrong with their body.
Hip pain sits near the top of the list of what goes wrong, and it is one of the easiest complaints to leave sitting for months.
Why “a bit sore” is worth taking seriously
Most hip pain in people over 65 comes down to five things, and they behave very differently from one another.
Osteoarthritis is the wear on the joint itself, when the cartilage that cushions the hip thins out. Gluteal tendinopathy is the breakdown of the tendons on the outside of the hip, and it’s especially common in older women. Then there’s bursitis, when a small fluid sac near the joint gets inflamed. A labral tear is damage to the ring of tissue lining the hip socket, and a plain hip strain comes from muscles being overstretched.
To the person feeling it, several of these are hard to tell apart. Pain on the side of the hip when they lie on it at night suggests one thing. A deep ache in the groin that bites getting out of a chair suggests another. Your parents won’t be able to tell you which one it is, and there is no reason they should. To them it is all just a sore hip, when it could be any of five separate problems that each need a different fix.
Waiting makes two of them worse
Plenty of aches settle on their own if you wait them out. Osteoarthritis and gluteal tendinopathy are not like that, and here is why the delay matters.
Gluteal tendinopathy responds well to the right loading exercises when you catch it early. Left alone, the tendon keeps degrading, the person starts avoiding the movements that hurt, the surrounding muscles weaken, and you end up managing something far more stubborn than what you started with.
Osteoarthritis is not reversible, but how fast it progresses is heavily shaped by what someone does day to day. Building strength around the joint slows the decline, and so does keeping weight off it. A parent who stops walking because it hurts loses the exact thing that was protecting the joint. By the time someone finally looks at it properly, that joint is harder to help than it was, and that is on top of the months your parents spent quietly uncomfortable.
The signs they’re downplaying it on the phone
Your parents will not come straight out with how bad it is, so you listen for the things around it.
- They’ve stopped mentioning activities they used to talk about. No more bowls, no more walking the dog the long way.
- They describe the pain in the past tense to make it sound resolved: “it was hurting last week.”
- You hear them get up from a chair, or a small sound when they move, that wasn’t there before.
- They mention sleeping in the spare room, or not sleeping well, without connecting it to the hip.
- They’ve started declining things: the visit up to you, or standing at the kitchen bench long enough to cook a proper meal.
No single item here proves anything. But when several of them turn up in the same few weeks, the hip is clearly running more of their day than they are letting on.
Finding the right care near them
Distance can actually work in your favour here. You are not the one who has to drive them to appointments. You are the one who can set the whole thing up, and setting it up is most of what gets it done.
Coordinating a parent’s care from the Gold Coast is far simpler when everything happens under one roof. A clinic that houses several disciplines means one phone call and one treatment plan, rather than separate physio and podiatry bookings scattered across town that nobody is joining up. If your parents are in the Darling Downs, for example, Optimise Health, an allied health clinic treating hip pain in Toowoomba and Warwick, runs physiotherapy, podiatry, clinical Pilates and hydrotherapy from the one practice, so your mum or dad is matched to the right practitioner instead of guessing who to book first.
Podiatry belongs in that mix because hip pain can start at the feet. A biomechanical problem down there changes how the hip joint loads on every step. Wherever your parents live, ask any clinic how its practitioners hand a patient from one discipline to the next. The answer will tell you more than the website does.
The one-roof arrangement matters for you specifically because you can’t be in the room. When the physio and the podiatrist are on the same team as whoever runs the hydrotherapy, the plan holds together without you relaying messages between three providers who have never spoken to each other.
Before you book anything, get a GP referral sorted. It sets the direction and, depending on the situation, can open up a chronic disease management plan that subsidises a set number of allied health visits. That conversation is worth having early, because it changes what the care costs your parents over a year.
What to actually say to them
A reluctant parent digs their heels in the moment they feel handled, so how you bring it up matters.
Skip “you need to see someone” as an opener. Ask them something you genuinely want the answer to, like “what does it stop you doing?” That shifts the conversation away from whether there is a problem and onto what it is costing them, and the cost is the part they will be straight with you about.
Then offer to do the annoying bit. “I’ll find somewhere and sort the booking, you just have to turn up” removes the two things they’re most likely to use as reasons not to go: the phone calls, and not knowing where to start.
Talk about it as protecting what they can already do. Nobody in their seventies wants to hear they are falling apart. What they want is to carry on gardening and driving, and to stay in the house they chose.
Then follow up on the next Sunday call, gently. “Did you book it yet” only lands as nagging. “How’s the hip been this week” does the same job without the pressure, and you will hear the real answer in how fast they change the subject.
