ARTHRITIS

“I have been diagnosed with arthritis.”

Arthritis? So? What’s so unusual about that? Everybody eventually gets it, right? It’s like grey hair.

This may sound like a crass statement, and yes it probably is. It’s a reaction to a very poorly worded diagnosis. It’s about as vague as telling someone they have lumbago. There are hundreds of causes of lumbago, from extremely serious (like cancer), to a little tiny ache periodically. Lumbago is a meaningless term, and really the word arthritis is too.

Why? Because there are over 100 types and many of them are quite different. Osteoarthritis, gout and Paget’s disease are all forms of it but they have very little in common, except that all three affect the joints.

Very often we are faced with a condition that really should be called arthrOSIS, not ITIS. WHY? Because there is no inflammation. That's why anti-inflammatory medication doesn't help. Getting the joint moving again, and rehabbing the surrounding tissue is what will relieve the pain and disability.

Two distinct kinds

It’s perhaps useful to think of two distinct kinds of the disease. That which affects

a single joint (for example, the hip) or a few joints close together (such as in the neck), and those forms that are
systemic, meaning they can affect many joints and even other organs. For example gout may affect the great toe (classically) and other joints far from the toe, like the shoulder. Some forms of these whole-body arthritides, quite distinct diseases, also affect the organs. They can change the skin, the kidneys and the heart, for example, … almost any and every organ system in the body.

The crippling pain that a child might get with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis is light years away from the painful degenerative knees that the obese get. It’s also from a quite different planetary system to Immobilisation Arthritis, now proved to be the most common form of Osteoarthritis, which mostly responds very well to chiropractic.

Where is all this leading us? It’s probably true to say that straight chiropractic can’t do much to help in the treatment of the systemic arthritides, except in a general sense, by keeping the body in harmony with itself through gentle adjustments, stretching and exercises. Fortunately they are relatively uncommon. But if you have an attack of extreme pain in your great toe, and it becomes swollen, red and hot, then for heaven's sake go to your medical doctor first, not your chiropractor. The inflammatory changes of gout are best managed medically. For more information about the sytemic arthritides take a look at this excellent site written by a medical rheumatologist.

Osteo-Arthritis (OA) and Immobilisation Arthritis (IA)

But the most common form is called Osteoarthritis, and a major subdivision of it called Immobilisation Arthritis, is what we chiropractors work with day in and day out. It’s our bread and butter, and chiropractic is probably the best form of treatment for localised painful and stiff joints, because mostly it’s not inflamed. It's really an arthrosis, not an arthritis. Anti-inflammatories are not the treatment of choice – getting the joint moving again is, and that’s what chiropractic excels in.

Cartilage

What do all forms of this large group of disease have in common? They affect the cartilage that covers the ends of bones. This cartilage makes it easy for bones to articulate easily with a neighbour. It is white, hard and very smooth, with a polished look about it. Interested? Next time you have leg of lamb (if you’re not a vegetarian!), then before you throw the bones into a pot to make a broth for your next soup, cut open the hip joint and take a good look. Fascinating! It’s like highly polished marble. Believe it or not, its slip index is lower than ice on ice. But when the joints become arthritic, this cartilage becomes rough and pitted. The symptoms? Stiffness first usually, and then pain as the disease progresses.

What causes these degenerative changes in the joint cartilage? Hundreds of causes, and they need to be managed in quite different ways. Gout arthritis requires a change of diet and perhaps, if that fails, medication to lower the uric acid in the blood. Gout is one of the most treatable forms of systemic A.

Joint fluids

What you can’t see in Mary’s little lamb’s hip (sorry, that’s in poor taste!), is that the joint is bathed in a fluid. It is this liquid that feeds the cartilage, and the most common form of OA is called Immobilisation Arthritis (IA), when this fluid is not adequately replaced by the body. We are now discovering that IA is not the same as OA, which is really a wear-and-tear, though the end result is the same when seen on an x-ray. But under a microscope, at a cellular level, the changes are quite different. A huge amount of research has been done on IA, but little of it finds its way into the popular literature. It’s just dumped in with OA, and assumed to be as inevitable as grey hair. Not so! Read more about Immobilisation A, the most common form.

USEFUL LINKS.

To go from ARTHRITIS back to CHIROPRACTIC CONDITIONS
For more useful Health information
Sources of Natural Antioxidants

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