Unfortunately, arthritis can arise in many forms and can affect everyone – including children and adolescents. While the most commonly known form, Osteoarthritis, is a degenerative disease that progresses as we age, many forms of inflammatory arthritis can affect people at any age.
The most common form of inflammatory arthritis is Rheumatoid arthritis, or RA. There are other forms of inflammatory arthrities, such as Psoriatic arthritis, or PSA, Ankylosing spondylitis, arthritis with Chron’s disease, Polimyalgya Rheumatica, Gout, Psuedogout, Lupus or SLE and others. Please be assured that we are experts in treating all of them. But RA is a prototypic form of joint inflammation and although every type of arthritis has it’s own feat hers, treatment approach is quite close, so we will discuss mostly RA. Should you want more info about this, it could be found on ACR website.
If you have joint pain and/or arthritis, it is very important to know what kind of arthritis do you have. It takes a lot of training and experience for a physician to arrive at the correct diagnosis. On its earlier stages the Rheumatoid Arthritis is quite often insidious with normal X-rays and even lab results which make it difficult to distinguish it from Osteoarthritis or Other disease causing pain.
At our practice we have seen many RA patients who had been misdiagnosed and were receiving prolong treatment with OTC drugs or physical therapy – which could be appropriate for Osteoarthritis but inadequate for the RA. The caveat is that such therapy could not stop the inflammatory process but may relieve an acute pain and thus created an illusion of some “improvement”. In the mean time, joint damage progresses. Study show that erosions (damage of the joints) can form very early, even after two months of disease. If the correct diagnosis was not established early enough, the precious window of opportunity to save the joints from damage may have been missed… That does not mean that patients with long standing RA can not be helped; Rheumatoid arthritis treatment can be accomplished at any stage. But the early detection of this disease will bring much better results in terms of therapy; that’s why we are so passionate about the early diagnostics of this condition. We want the best results for our patients!