I thought this was a very interesting article about joint pain from eMedicine. It covers a lot of info concerning diagnosing and treating joint pain.
From the article:
Two determinations serve to focus the history and physical examination of a patient with joint pain.
The first determination is whether the pain stems from the joint or an adjacent bursa, tendon, ligament, bone, or muscle or whether it is referred from a visceral organ or nerve root. This is generally more difficult with pain in proximal, larger joints. Thus, hip pain can arise from degenerative disc disease or stenosis of the lumbar spine, aortoiliac occlusive disease, hip arthritis, or trochanteric bursitis.
If the pain is stemming from the joint, the 3 broad categories of joint disease must be differentiated.
The first category is inflammatory arthritis. It is characterized by inflammation affecting joint structures, such as the synovium, synovial fluid, and entheses. The second category is noninflammatory arthritis. This is joint disease resulting primarily from alterations in the structure or mechanics of the joint. The joint disease may occur as a result of (1) cartilage or meniscal damage with or without concomitant alterations in the structure of the subchondral bone or (2) alterations in joint anatomy as a result of congenital, developmental, metabolic, or past inflammatory diseases. The third category is arthralgia. Apart from joint tenderness, abnormalities of the joint cannot be identified. Such patients may have a syndrome of altered pain sensation (eg, fibromyalgia) or an early rheumatic syndrome whose clinical signs are not yet apparent or too subtle for detection (eg, arthralgias of systemic lupus erythematosus [SLE]).
These types of joint disorders may occur together in the same joint. Inflammatory joint disorders often lead to structural derangement of the joint, and, similarly, structural joint problems (eg, traumatic arthritis, osteoarthritis) often have an associated, albeit minor, inflammatory component. Finally, reports of joint pain and tenderness in any type of joint disease are influenced by the patient's emotional state and pain threshold.
http://www.emedicine.com/med/topic3562.htm
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