News Article

What does arthritis mean?

Joint inflammation is what arthritis means. Arthritis encompasses a wide variety of diseases and is not a single disease.

Most people don’t realize that there are over 100 conditions and rheumatic diseases that are all arthritis related. What they all do is cause pain, swelling and stiffness in a variety of manners and all of them affect different parts of the body.

The time that joints are starting to get damaged is when it is said that you have arthritis. Most of us realize that this condition affects the older population. Each of the different forms of arthritis all have there own cause.

The common thread between all arthritis

What you are going to find that all the different forms of arthritis have in common is that pain is the number one answer. This pain is going to be located in different areas as well as feeling different to all of the individuals.

What are some of the warning signs for arthritis?

One main sign other than pain is the stiffness, swelling in moving your joints

Are you feeling stiffness and swelling in one or more of your joints and have you been feeling this for a couple weeks or more? If you answered yes to the above then you need to visit your physician and have these warning signs diagnosed and treated.

I am not going to go into all of the different types of arthritis and their symptoms. What I am going to do is list a few for you, and I will do another article that will list many others. So here are a few types of arthritis and the symptoms that are associated with them.

Osteoarthritis - what you will find is that the pain is worse at night or after rest. Osteo arthritis is a degenerative joint disease that results from wear and tear. Some of the symptoms of this are:

pain tenderness swelling decreased function

The onset of osteo arthritis is very subtle and gradual, usually involving one or only a few joints. Some of the joints most affected by this are:

knees hips hands spine

Rheumatoid - you are going to feel the most pain during the morning. If this happens in children and/or the elderly then the pain may not be as pronounced. Now sometimes there are going to be cases when certain limbs don’t want to function.

When you are suffering from Rheumatoid arthritis you are suffering from an auto immune disease. What is happening is the body is attacking itself. This can be a chronic and a disabling problem and can cause the following:

Rheumatoid arthritis symptoms are similar to the other types of arthritis you can possibly lose function of a joint there is going to be pain in the joint swelling will be evident the joint will become stiff

Rheumatoid arthritis remains a mystery to doctor’s on why it occurs. Some believe that it is genetic. When it is first starting out, it can be tough to tell if a person is suffering from this disease since it happens so slow at first.

Some of the other types of arthritis and by no means is this a complete list are the following. Gout and pseudogout, you have septic, as mentioned rheumatiod arthritis and don’t forget juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and also mentioned osteoarthritis, bursitis and there are many others that have not been mentioned.

The advances in medicine today have made treating the different types of arthritis many. You can use medicine prescribed by your doctor or even over the counter drugs and also arthroplasty and this is only a couple of ways to treat arthritis symptoms.

As a last resort and when the pain becomes so severe that prosthetic joint replacement may be the answer to the problem. Other treatments have failed and surgery is now necessary. Patient’s are quite satisfied of the results of joint replacement. I know of a friend who had a new hip put in and he is back out playing golf like nothing happened to him. You would never know he had this done and he is so grateful that he did.

4500 B.C. where when the first signs of arthritis were seen. So as you can see this disease has been around for a very long time.

It was noticed that the Native American’s of Tennessee had arthritis. In fact ankle osteo arthritis was noticed in dinosaur remains.

Today all we can do is to treat the pain and stiffness that is associated with the symptoms of arthritis. Maybe in the future as studies continue on this disease, a cure may come. But for now all we can do is to treat the symptoms.

There are other methods to help arthritis sufferers. I only mentioned a couple in this article. I will detail other methods in a future article.