Osteoarthritis is a relatively common joint disease, and many people will understand all arthritis as rheumatoid arthritis. So if you suffer from osteoarthritis in life, how should we treat osteoarthritis? Are there any misunderstandings in the treatment of osteoarthritis? Let’s read the article below.
How to treat osteoarthritis
Treatment method 1. Protect joints
You should limit joint weight-bearing activities and avoid standing for too long or walking long distances. You can use A walking stick can be used to reduce the load on the affected joints. Those who are overweight should lose weight. Pay attention to keeping the affected joints warm and away from wind and cold. In severe cases, you can rest in bed for a short period of time and be completely immobilized.
Treatment method 2: Raise awareness of prevention
Patients should promptly understand the dangers of this type of disease and the importance of early treatment. The most taboo thing when you are sick is to be sick. Procrastinating again and again can effectively improve the patient's awareness of the risk of the disease, eliminate some unnecessary factors, help control the disease and restore function, and at the same time build confidence in defeating the disease.
Treatment method 3. Local physical therapy
In the acute stage, when the joints are hot, swollen and painful, local ice compresses should be applied first, and hot compresses should be used immediately after the fever and swelling have subsided. In the chronic stage, infrared rays, ultrashort waves, acupuncture, wax therapy, massage, etc. can be used to provide appropriate relief.
Treatment method 4. Functional exercise
Reasonable exercise can restore muscle contraction, joint flexibility and prevent and treat osteoporosis. Unreasonable exercise will increase joint load. Cause further damage to cartilage, thereby aggravating clinical symptoms. It is often seen that some patients' symptoms worsen after blindly engaging in uncomfortable exercises such as walking long distances, dancing to discotheques, or even running, climbing, etc.
Treatment method 5. Drug treatment
Mainly refers to the application of systemic and local analgesic drugs. However, these drugs have many side effects, especially gastrointestinal side effects, which limits the use of these drugs. Long-term use of similar drugs. In recent years, coxib drugs such as Vioxx and Celebrex have also begun to be used. These drugs are specific COX-2 inhibitors and have little gastrointestinal irritation.
Eight misunderstandings about the treatment of osteoarthritis
1. Blindly taking Chinese medicine for treatment
In people's traditional thinking, there is a saying called "General Principles" If it doesn’t hurt, if it hurts, it won’t work.” Since osteoarthritis causes joint pain, it can be attributed to Bi syndrome. This condition is usually caused by external influences, such as joint diseases caused by cold, dampness, etc., so some people think it is "old cold legs".
However, modern medicine believes that the cause of osteoarthritis goes far beyond the scope of Bi syndrome, but is the damage to articular cartilage caused by a variety of factors. If you do not fully understand this and blindly take traditional Chinese medicine for treatment, it will bring serious adverse consequences.
Chinese medicines are not without toxicity. Some Chinese medicines used to treat rheumatism, such as promoting blood circulation, removing blood stasis, and unblocking muscles and collaterals, have the effect of fighting poison with poison, but they will damage liver and kidney functions. A patient once took vines to treat joint pain and developed acute renal failure. Long-term blind treatment will also delay the condition and cause patients to lose the best opportunity for treatment.
2. Blindly treat it as rheumatism
Because many rheumatism diseases have joint pain, patients often subjectively think that as long as they have joint pain, it is rheumatism before a diagnosis is made. Seek medical advice everywhere. It is not uncommon for osteoarthritis to be treated as rheumatoid arthritis.
3. Blindly take "bone spur softening" drugs
Many patients often seek medical treatment when they are ill. In order to relieve their pain, they look for drugs to eliminate bone spurs. In fact, there is no such method. Scientifically based. As mentioned above, bone spurs are bone hyperplasia, which is produced after the degeneration of articular cartilage, so bone spurs are also bones.
How can bones be eliminated through medicine? There is no such miracle medicine in the world. Imagine that if there is a drug that can dissolve bone, what serious adverse reactions will this drug bring to the human body? Therefore, the ability of a drug to soften bone spurs is completely misleading and must not be believed.
4. Blindly supplementing trace elements (calcium, zinc, etc.)
Supplementing trace elements can be helpful to the disease. For example, calcium supplementation is beneficial to osteoporosis. However, the cause of osteoarthritis is not trace element deficiency, so supplementing trace elements has no direct therapeutic effect.
5. Long-term only symptomatic treatment
In order to relieve the pain, symptomatic treatment is needed. However, it is generally a temporary and short-term treatment, while many patients take long-term non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs for symptomatic treatment. This type of drug is familiar to patients with osteoarthritis and may be commonly used, such as indomethacin, Voltaren, ibuprofen, Fenbid, etc.
Such drugs undoubtedly play a positive role in relieving pain, but they also have many adverse effects on the body. To sum up, the positive and negative effects of these drugs on this disease are as follows.
⑴ It can reduce joint pain and relieve symptoms, but it cannot solve the fundamental problem, that is, it only treats the symptoms, not the root cause, because this type of medicine cannot control the development of the disease. Therefore, non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs cannot be used alone for a long time.
⑵ There are many drug side effects, such as liver and kidney damage, gastrointestinal ulcers and bleeding, blood and nervous system effects, and femoral head necrosis. About 50% of patients with gastric and duodenal ulcers, bleeding or erosion induced by non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs have no symptoms, and some elderly people even feel no pain even if they have large ulcers in their digestive tract. They did not go to the hospital until they had gastrointestinal bleeding.
Some patients eventually develop renal failure and require dialysis treatment due to long-term use of non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs. Some patients also suffer from a sharp drop in platelets due to the use of non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs. , resulting in death from cerebral hemorrhage. Therefore, these drugs must be used with caution. Osteoarthritis is not life-threatening in nature, so do not risk death due to improper use of medication.
⑶Has adverse effects on cartilage. Clinical studies have proven that non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs inhibit cartilage synthesis and can directly destroy chondrocytes. The lesions of osteoarthritis are in the cartilage. Long-term use of non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs can damage joint cartilage and aggravate osteoarthritis. The longer the use of non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs and the higher the dose, the more serious the destruction of articular cartilage.
6. Weight does not matter in the treatment
Losing weight, reducing joint damage and weight-bearing play a very important role in the treatment of osteoarthritis, but this is very important. Little known. As early as the 1930s, some people noticed that obese people have a tendency to develop osteoarthritis. Foreign literature reports that the incidence of osteoarthritis in obese patients is 12% to 43%.
Someone collected data from patients with osteoarthritis more than 30 years before the onset of the disease and found that men who exceeded 20% of the standard weight at the age of 37 were 1.5 times more likely to develop osteoarthritis than those with a standard weight. In women, it is 2.1 times higher.
In the next 36 years, the risk of severe knee osteoarthritis increased to 1.9 times for men and 3.2 times for women. 60% of overweight people developed knee osteoarthritis.
For overweight people, special attention should be paid to the role of weight loss in the treatment of osteoarthritis. Some studies suggest that losing 5 kilograms of weight in 10 years can reduce the incidence of knee osteoarthritis by 50%. Patients with osteoarthritis should try to reduce their weight to within the standard range. The simple method to calculate the standard weight is: weight (kg) = height-105.
7. Related treatments are optional
①Medical physical exercise
Carry out relevant muscle exercises to coordinate muscle movements and enhance muscle strength, which can relieve joint pain symptoms, enhance the strength and endurance around the joints and increase the stability of the joints, maintain and increase the range of joint activities and improve the ability of daily activities, which is conducive to disease recovery and disease control.
②The role of society and family
Severely ill patients can be relieved when they receive care, understanding, support and help from society and family.
③Physical therapy
Physical therapy plays an important role in the treatment of osteoarthritis. Especially for those who cannot relieve symptoms or cannot tolerate drugs, physiotherapy is a better option. treatment methods. It helps strengthen the patient's muscles and improves range of motion. In the acute phase, physical therapy focuses on relieving pain and reducing swelling; in the chronic phase, it focuses on enhancing local blood circulation and improving joint function.
④Protect damaged joints
Special attention should be paid to avoiding mechanical damage to the joints and minimizing the load-bearing and wear of the joints. For example, patients with osteoarthritis of the knee and ankle joints usually Try to avoid going up and down stairs, squatting, standing, kneeling for long periods of time, climbing mountains, and trekking long distances, which are more strenuous activities that damage joints, especially when joints are swollen.
I have treated many patients whose conditions worsened after strenuous exercise. For example, some elderly people participated in a disco dance competition and practiced for a long time. As a result, they suffered from knee joint swelling, pain, and the inability to walk. In order to achieve the purpose of physical exercise, patients can choose sports with lighter weight on the joints such as swimming, cycling, and gymnastics. They can also use handles, canes, knee pads, walkers, wedge-shaped insoles, or other auxiliary facilities to assist joint movements.
⑤Wearing shoes is also important
Wear appropriate shoes. In fact, wearing flat shoes is not the best choice. Because when walking in flat shoes, the weight will be too much on the heels. If you walk for a long time, the upward momentum may cause pain and discomfort in the heels, ankles, knees, hips, waist and other parts. Adverse effects on joints can lead to symptoms of osteoarthritis, and sometimes headaches, dizziness, etc.
Moreover, due to the reduced cushioning effect of the arch of the foot, it is easy to cause fractures when the foot is exerted improperly. Therefore, it is best to wear soft shoes with elastic soles, such as casual shoes with wedge heels, which can reduce the impact of gravity on the joints and reduce joint wear. In addition, the heel of the shoe should not be too high, it should be about 2 cm higher than the forefoot of the sole. Do not wear high heels. Since the elderly are prone to osteoarthritis, in addition to paying attention to the height of the heel, the soles of the shoes for the elderly should be slightly wider and must have anti-slip ripples to avoid falling.
8. Chondroprotective agents can be used or not
Currently, commonly used chondroprotective agents can prevent the pathological process of osteoarthritis. This type of drug is a permanent drug that can improve the condition of cartilage, restore the normal biochemical environment of the joint, and repair the damaged articular cartilage. Many patients do not realize the fundamental therapeutic effect of this type of drugs and believe that they should be used or not, which greatly reduces the therapeutic effect.
Conclusion: Suffering from arthritis, I always feel uncomfortable everywhere, sometimes it is osteoarthritis. After reading the above introduction, I also have an understanding of the treatment methods of osteoarthritis. There are misunderstandings about every disease, and this article also eliminates misunderstandings about treatment. I hope this article will be helpful to you.