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Arthritis Meaning?

Arthritis literally means joint inflammation. You also have to understand that arthritis is not a single disease. Arthritis refers to an entire group 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.

Some of these conditions will actually damaged the joints of the body. When this happens this is often referred to as arthritis. This happens to be the leading cause for disability of our elderly population, as well as those of age 65 and greater. Now with arthritis, there are many different forms and each of these forms will have its own cause.

What is the common theme of arthritis?

The 100 forms of arthritis do have something very much in common. Pain is common, far and away the number one answer. This pain is going to be different for each of the sufferers and where the pain is located is also going to be different.

What are some of the warning signs for arthritis?

One main sign other than pain is the stiffness, swelling in moving your joints

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.

Osteoarthritis - what you will find is that the pain is worse at night or after rest. Osteo arthritis is a degenerative joint disease that results from wear and tear. Some of the symptoms of this are:

tenderness decreased function of the joint pain in affected joint swelling

When you are suffering from osteo arthritis, to tell initially may be tough. The onset is subtle and a gradual type thing. This is going to be one joint or several joints that can become affected and those joints may be the following:

tough on the knees sore hands hips become sore and stiff spine area is affected

Rheumatoid - pain is felt in the morning. Sometimes in the elderly and children the pain may not be as pronounced, but some limbs may not want to function.

When you are suffering from Rheumatoid arthritis you are suffering from an auto immune disease. What is happening is the body is attacking itself. This can be a chronic and a disabling problem and can cause the following:

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.

With the technology today and the advances in medicine, treating arthritis symptoms have become many. Drugs, either over the counter or stronger drugs prescribed by your doctor is one way and then there is also arthroplasty. This is just a couple ways to treat the symptoms.

When joint pain is so severe that there may come a time when prosthetic joint replacement may become necessary. The people who have had this done are very satisfied with the results.

Arthritis has been around a long time. The first traces of arthritis dates back to 4500 B.C.

Dinosaurs have even had evidence to have had ankle osteoarthritis. The skeletal remains of Native Americans of Tennessee were noticed to have arthritis.

There may be a time in the future when a cure for arthritis will be found. But today we can just treat the symptoms of arthritis the best we can. To help the person have a better form of life is what the goal is today, by using drugs and other treatments. Time will tell if something happens out on the horizon, but for now there is no cure for arthritis but there are natural arthritis treatments that are available.

There are other methods to help arthritis sufferers. I only mentioned a couple in this article. I will detail other methods in a future article.