Arthritis

What are the best treatments for arthritis?

In essence, arthritis means inflammation of a joint. It could be one joint or it could be many joints. The treatment of arthritis can be divided into three major areas in medicine. The commonest are what we call anti-inflammatory drugs.The first one, everybody knows, is aspirin. It was the first anti-inflammatory that was produced but because of its side effects and the frequency with which you need to take it, we now go on to use other types of anti-inflammatory. They're extremely helpful for the vast majority of arthritis patients. In situations where anti-inflammatories are not effective then there are two other large groups of drugs, one being cortical steroids. Cortisone has a lot of side effects and we don't like to use them willy-nilly. There's another large group of steroids called disease modifying drugs which are normally handled by rheumatologists for the more severe types of arthritis, like rheumatoid arthritis and such like.