Rheumatoid Arthritis – Symptom relief and resources

If you don’t already know, a person who has chronic arthritis faces a lot of life altering changes. Therefore it is important to learn how to: accept the limitations, better coping strategies, and adjusting life to the chronic pain.

Taking 4 simple actions may help a person to better deal with the challenges arthritis brings as well as maintaining a positive attitude. These 4 actions include educate, motivate, participate, and medicate.

According to a new Belgian study, glucosamine and chondroitin help lower the pain as well as improving the functions of the knees in Osteoarthritis (OA) and are very safe. John Klippel, M.D. who is the medical director of the Arthritis Foundation, says glucosamine is so great because it lowers cartilage loss and slows the progression of OA. In one study, glucosamine showed to reduce arthritis knee pain and disability 20% to 25% in patients taking 1,500 milligrams of glucosamine on a daily bases for 3 years. Although, glucosamine and chondroitin are typically used together, Klippel says that there is no proof that they work better together than alone.

It is can be very hard to decide which therapy works best to treat arthritis. Therefore if you are debating of whether to use hot or cold therapy to treat your arthritis pain you will usually be better off using a cold therapy to treat this pain. Although many people commonly use heat therapy for arthritis, most people get better results with ice therapy because of the numbing effect of the cold. Cold will give a numbing sensation and will also reduce the pain and muscle spasms in arthritis.

When we walk there is a mechanical loading of the knee joints which causes Osteoarthritis (OA) to slowly progress. Customized footwear and orthotics have been developed to reduce the symptoms of OA. However, before Shakoor et al, it had not been systematically studied how wearing or not wearing footwear will effect dynamic knee loading. Shakoor et al taken patients with OA and examined them while they walked barefoot and compared their results with patients wearing normal footwear.