The Meaning of Arthritis

The meaning of arthritis is joint inflammation. What a lot of people don’t understand is that arthritis is not just one disease but a wide variety of diseases

Today there are many rheumatic diseases and other conditions that are called arthritis. In fact there are over a 100 and all of them will cause pain, stiffness and swelling of the joints.

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

We have a hundred different forms of arthritis, so what is common with all of them? The answer to this question is without a doubt pain. The arthritis pain will be different among all of the individuals suffering from arthritis, and the location of the pain will also be different.

Some symptoms of arthritis to warn you of possible problems

Swelling of your joints and stiffness are some of the signs and symptoms that you may be suffering from arthritis.

If you have one or more of the above symptoms for two weeks or more, you need to go and talk to your doctor. You need to go and have these warning signs and/or symptoms diagnosed and treated.

There are so many different types of arthritis, and I am not going to list all of them here. This would become quite a long article. What I am going to do is to list a few with the symptoms that go along with each.

Osteo arthritis - this is really a degenerative joint disease and most of the time the pain is worse at night or after resting. Usually this occurs due to wear and tear on the body. Symptoms of Osteo arthritis can be:

tenderness decreased function of the joint pain in affected joint swelling

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 - most often the pain is felt in the morning. When in the elderly and children some of the limbs may refuse to function and the pain may not be as pronounced.

Rhuematoid arthritis can be a potentially disabling disease. The body is attacking isself. This is how Rhuematoid arthritis is an auto immune disease. Problems can be:

Some of these symptoms are similar to other types of arthritis. you can have stiffness pain in the affected joint swelling of the joint you can lose function of the joint

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.

Here are some of the other types of arthritis, and don’t forget there are many more not listed. You have as mentioned rheumatoid, osteo arthritis, gout, pseudogout, septic, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and there are as I say many others.

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.

There are times when joint pain become so severe that it may be time to try prosthetic joint replacement. This treatment has become highly effective and the patient’s are very satisfied.

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 treatments besides the couple listed above and I will talk about them in another article.