Painful Arthritis

The word arthritis means joint inflammation, it refers to a group of more than 100 rheumatic diseases that can cause pain, stiffness, and swelling in the joints.

The pain of arthritis may come from different sources. These may include inflammation of the synovial membrane (tissue that lines the joints, and contain the joint fluid), the tendons, or the ligaments; muscle strain; and fatigue. A combination of these factors contributes to the intensity of the pain.

Factors that related to the pain include swelling of the joint, heat or redness present, or damage that has occurred within the joint.

Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis. No longer considered just a consequence of aging, researches now looking for a cause: musculoskeletal defects, genetic defects, obesity, or injury. Human may not be able to control a genetic trait or knock knees, there are some definite actions he can take to protect his joints and help prevent osteoarthritis:

1. Maintain your ideal body weight. The more you weigh, the more stress you are putting on your joints, especially your hips, knees, back and feet.
2. Exercise. Exercise protects joints by strengthening the muscles around them. Strong muscles keep your joints from rubbing against one another.
3. Stand up straight. to distribute your weight equally on your joints.
4. Be careful when lifting heavy weights .
5. Listen to your body. If you are in pain, don't ignore it.
6. Don't be static. Changing positions regularly will decrease the stiffness in your muscles and joints.

These precautions will help you protect your joints, and avoid arthritis, but what if it already present (the arthritic pain)?? of course you should use medications, and we will discuss it in the next article.

What is PAIN?

To know your enemy is the best way to fight him, so lets know better about pain, then find how to kill it.

Lets begin by defining the Pain, which is “unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with tissue damage”. Although pain is a reaction of the body to harmful stimuli and is therefore a protective early warning system; but also it may cause bad effects like reduction of the respiration. Hence, the term pain, derived from the Latin poena for punishment, reflects the
bad effects that can be made to the body.

Pain has both sensory and psychological sides, one person may feel pain in response to a stimuli, while another person may disregard the stimuli. The psychological side of pain have major effect on the persons response to pain,
example: A patient under external stress or other significant psychological problems often
cannot handle the additional stress of pain.

After what previously mentioned , we should know how could pain affect body badly; It may cause anxiety or exacerbate (increase) it, affect sleeping, affect your feeling, if it is intense pain it may cause reduction in respiration rate; So it should be stopped !!!!

In general, pain can be described as either acute or chronic:
1-Acute pain, which does not outlast (persist) and has three general origins.
a-Superficial origin from wounds, irritants, and heat.
b-Pain of deep somatic origin usually arises from injection of chemical irritants or
from ischemia(restriction of blood suply to specific tissue), such as with myocardial infarction.
c-Acute pain of visceral origin is most often associated with inflammation.

2-Chronic pain, by contrast, outlasts, which in many cases is of unknown origin. Chronic pain is often associated with diseases such as cancer and arthritis. Neuropathic pain, is a type of chronic pain.

The cycle of reactions that cause pain should be interrupted, and this is achieved by Analgesics, either opioid or non opioid, according to the nature and type of pain.