When you visit your doctor to find out what you should do about your hip pain, she will probably ask you to describe the kind of pain you are experiencing. Hearing about your symptoms of hip pain will help her determine the cause of your discomfort.

“The first question is, where does the hip hurt?” says Steven Stuchin, MD, director of orthopedic surgery at the Hospital for Joint Diseases of New York University Medical Center and associate professor at the NYU School of Medicine in New York City.

Many people are confused about where their hip really is. “Pain that involves the hip joint is usually in the groin, right where your leg meets your body," Dr. Stuchin says. "The hip joint is in the groin and you can feel it as low as your knee, in the front of your leg down the thigh.”

Here are some common hip pain complaints and their symptoms.

Arthritis: With arthritis-based hip pain, it hurts to move your legs. That includes walking, climbing stairs, and bending down to pick things up. There are many reasons arthritis could be causing your hip pain:

  • Osteoarthritis can occur after an injury or infection causes damage to the hip joint.
  • Hip dysplasia, a problem with the formation of your hip, can cause early hip arthritis.
  • Rheumatoid arthritis causes an inflammatory immune response that affects all your joints.

Piriformis syndrome: With piriformis syndrome, moving the leg out or back from the body causes pain in the buttocks and lower back. “Your hip has some very powerful muscles. Among them is the piriformis,” explains Stuchin. “The piriformis is in the back of the hip and helps rotate the leg outwards.”

The sciatic nerve is just behind it; in some people, the nerve goes between the tendons of the piriformis muscle. When the muscle pulls, it acts like a pincer on the nerve, causing the pain you feel, explains Stuchin.

Snapping hip: A patient might tell her doctor: “When I move my leg, I feel a pop in my hip at the top of my thigh.” The snapping sound is a tendon, explains Stuchin. Some people are born with a tendon that “snaps” over the top of the femur, the bone that makes up your thigh. “As your leg moves, if that sheath of stuff catches on that bony projection, you’ll get a ‘snap.’”

Stress fracture of the femoral neck: A stress fracture of the femoral neck starts as a dull ache in the groin and gets progressively worse. The femoral neck is the region between the ball at the top of your femur (thigh bone) that moves in the socket of your pelvis bone and the rest of the femur. This can also feel like a pulled muscle, but unlike a muscle, it won’t respond to taking a break from exercise. There are two common reasons for a stress fracture to this area:

  • A fall
  • A repetitive stress injury as a result of vigorous exercise

Trochanteric bursitis: A patient might tell his doctor: “It’s painful to lie on my hip and at other times, I feel pain on the outside of that hip and upper thigh.” Trochanteric bursitis is an inflammation of the bursae, the fluid filled sacs that act as a cushion, located over the greater trochanter (a bony prominence next to the femoral neck).

If these hip pain descriptions do not perfectly explain your hip pain, don’t worry. Through the right diagnostic tests, your doctor probably still will be able to help identify and treat your pain.