Is Your Arthritis Acting Up?
Is your arthritis acting up?
I have heard a lot of people say things like this over my life. I guess that's what happens when you grow up with slightly older parents and grandparents than the average kids. But I think a lot of people over 40 will just attribute any joint pain they're experiencing to arthritis and leave it at that. If they get into really bad shape, the general progression is to go and see the general practitioner who sends the either to an orthopedic or a rheumatologist depending on a series of test results and x-rays. Why is that? Why would you have multiple doctors treating one condition? What does arthritis even mean? Literally, the greek translation just means an inflamed joint.
Did you know there are over 100 types of arthritis and related diseases?
The Arthritis Foundation, an advocacy and patient education group, states that there are over 100 named conditions describing arthritides, (the plural form of arthritis)! The disease classification breaks arthritis down into four large categories by answering these two basic questions.
Does it affect one joint or multiple joints?
Is the arthritis inflammatory or degenerative?
Now, I assure you that I am simplifying the classification system quite a bit. So I'll give you a few more distinctive factors as we go to help you understand what problems you or your loved ones might be facing.
Monoarthritis
Monoarthritis means that only one joint is affected. When this happens, it is usually the result of a single major trauma, like a sporting injury or a car accident. This is a degenerative process that cannot normally be repaired naturally. However, motion is almost always the key to keeping the degeneration from getting worse. And if you have been reading my blog, you'll know that motion is often synonymous with a chiropractic adjustment. When something needs motion, you need to get it adjusted! Monoarthritis can also be the result of inflammatory conditions like gout, (but gout and pseudo-gout can affect more than one joint, so let's not get carried away putting things in boxes).
Polyarthritis
Polyarthritis means that the arthritic process is affecting more than one joint. That's about all I'm going to say here, because this encapsulates 95% of the rest of the arthritides.
So what's the difference between degenerative and inflammatory?
If arthritis means inflamed joint, wouldn't all arthritis be inflammatory? That's an excellent question, and the logical answer seems like it would be yes. However, when we talk about degenerative and inflammatory, we're talking about the cause of the arthritis. Is it degenerating from some type of macro or micro trauma? Or is the joint degenerating/inflamed because of an auto-immune or metabolic cause?
Most cases of degenerative arthritis are simply going to be known as Osteoarthritis or OA. This is by far the most common cause of "arthritis" complaints in the United States.
If the cause is primarily chemical or metabolic, we're going to call that rheumatoid arthritis or RA for today, even though there are several other major variants in the inflammatory category that we're not going into today.
Osteoarthritis (OA) and what we can do about it...
So if osteoarthritis is the most common arthritis, what should we be doing? The most important thing that you can do is to keep moving! As the body recognizes the damage in the joint, it will begin to try to heal the damage in the joint.
Quiz time! How does the body generally heal bony structures? Did you ever break a bone as a child? That's right, it heals by making more bone. However, if there is no break, but there is joint damage, you might not want this extra bone in the joint. The body, though, has other ideas. It will eventually fuse the damaged joint together and prevent hat joint from ever moving again. When this happens, we call it degenerative joint disease. When it happens in the spine, we call it degenerative disc disease. The best way to keep this from progressing is regular chiropractic care. We can make sure that there is still motion in the joint for as long as the body allows it.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and what we can do about it...
Sadly, with rheumatoid arthritis is an entirely different beast. It isn't caused by macro or micro traumas, but instead it's caused by the improper function of the immune system. The body, for one reason or another, begins to attack the involved joint(s) and begins to erode the involved bone(s). That doesn't mean that motion in these areas is any less important. In fact, it might be even more important. Light-weight exercise and muscle strengthening in these areas will help alleviate the pressure on the joints and can help reduce symptoms. Diet will play a crucial part in managing RA as well.
What about all the other arthritides out there?
Well, there are a lot of them. But this is only one blog post, so I'm going to leave it here today. We'll talk more about what we can do for both types of arthritis as well as some other types not discussed in this entry later.
Yours in health,
Dr. William