How to treat osteoarthritis
Treatment 1. Protect joints
Joint weight-bearing activities should be restricted to avoid standing for too long or walking for a long distance, and crutches can be used to reduce the load on the affected joint. Overweight people should lose weight and pay attention to the warmth of the affected joints to avoid cold? In severe cases, you can stay in bed for a short time and brake completely.
Treatment 2. Raise awareness of prevention.
Patients should know the harmfulness of this kind of disease and the importance of early treatment in time. When they are sick, the most taboo is to delay their illness. This can effectively improve patients' understanding of the risk of disease, eliminate some unnecessary factors, help control the disease and restore the function, and establish confidence in overcoming the disease.
Treatment 3, local physical therapy.
In the case of acute joint fever and swelling, local ice should be applied in advance, and hot compress should be applied immediately after the fever has gone down and the swelling has subsided. In the chronic stage, infrared ray, ultrashort wave, acupuncture, wax therapy and massage can be used to relieve it appropriately.
Treatment 4. Functional exercise
Reasonable exercise can restore muscle contractility and joint flexibility and prevent osteoporosis, while unreasonable exercise will increase joint load and cause further damage to cartilage, thus aggravating clinical symptoms. I often see some patients blindly walking long distances, dancing disco, or even? After running, climbing mountains and other uncomfortable sports, the symptoms will get worse.
Treatment 5, drug therapy
Mainly refers to the application of systemic and local analgesic drugs, but these drugs have many side effects, especially gastrointestinal side effects, which limit the long-term application of these drugs. In recent years, bupivacaine drugs, such as Vioxx and celebrex, have also been used. These drugs are specific COX-2 inhibitors and have little gastrointestinal irritation.
Eight misunderstandings in the treatment of osteoarthritis
1. blindly taking traditional Chinese medicine for treatment
In people's traditional thinking, there is a saying that "the general principle does not hurt, but the pain will not work." Because osteoarthritis has joint pain, it will be attributed to arthralgia syndrome. This situation is usually influenced by external factors, such as joint diseases caused by cold and humidity, so some people think it is "old cold legs".
However, modern medicine believes that the cause of osteoarthritis is far beyond the scope of arthralgia syndrome, but the damage of articular cartilage caused by many factors. If we don't fully realize this, blindly taking traditional Chinese medicine treatment will bring serious adverse consequences.
Traditional Chinese medicine is not nontoxic. Some traditional Chinese medicines for treating rheumatism, such as promoting blood circulation and removing blood stasis, relaxing muscles and activating collaterals, have the effect of fighting poison with poison, but will do harm to liver and kidney function. There have been patients who took rattan plants to treat joint pain, leading to acute renal failure. Long-term blind treatment will also delay the illness and make patients lose the best treatment opportunity.
2. Blind treatment of rheumatism
Because many rheumatism have joint pain, patients often subjectively think that joint pain is rheumatism before diagnosis, and seek medical treatment everywhere according to rheumatism. It is not uncommon to treat osteoarthritis according to rheumatoid arthritis.
3. Take it blindly &; Quot Softening bone spurs &; medicine
Many patients often go to the hospital because of illness. In order to alleviate their pain, they searched everywhere for drugs to eliminate bone spurs. In fact, there is no scientific basis for this practice. As mentioned above, bone spurs are hyperplastic bones, which are produced after articular cartilage degeneration, so bone spurs are also bones.
How can bones be eliminated with drugs? There can't be such a magic medicine in the world. Imagine if there is a drug that can dissolve bone, what kind of serious adverse reactions will this drug bring to the human body? Therefore, it is completely misleading and absolutely unbelievable to say that drugs can soften bone spurs.
4. blindly supplement trace elements (calcium, zinc, etc. )
Supplementing trace elements is helpful to the condition, for example, calcium supplementation is good for osteoporosis. But the cause of osteoarthritis is not the lack of trace elements, so supplementing trace elements has no direct therapeutic effect.
5. Only long-term symptomatic treatment.
In order to relieve the pain, symptomatic treatment is needed. But it is usually temporary and short-term treatment, and many patients take non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs for symptomatic treatment for a long time. These drugs are familiar to patients with osteoarthritis, and may often be selected, such as indomethacin, voltarin, ibuprofen, fenbid and so on.
These drugs have undoubtedly played 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.
(1) can relieve joint pain and symptoms, but it can't solve the fundamental problem, that is, it only treats the symptoms, not the root cause, because these drugs can't control the development of the disease. Therefore, non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs cannot be used alone for a long time.
⑵ There are many side effects of drugs, such as liver and kidney function damage, digestive tract ulcer and bleeding, blood and nervous system influence, femoral head necrosis and so on. About 50% of patients with gastric and duodenal ulcer, bleeding or erosion caused by non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs are asymptomatic, and even some elderly people have a large area of digestive tract ulcer, and pain does not appear until gastrointestinal bleeding.
Some patients need dialysis treatment because of long-term use of non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs, and some patients die of cerebral hemorrhage because of the sharp drop of platelets caused by taking non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs. Therefore, such drugs must be used with caution. Osteoarthritis is not life-threatening, so don't die because of improper medication.
⑶ It has bad influence on cartilage. Clinical studies have proved that non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs can inhibit cartilage synthesis and directly destroy chondrocytes. The pathological changes of osteoarthritis are in cartilage. If you take non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs for a long time, it will destroy articular cartilage, thus aggravating osteoarthritis. The longer the use of non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs, the greater the dose, and the more serious the destruction of articular cartilage.
6. Weight is irrelevant in treatment.
Reducing weight, joint injury and load plays a very important role in the treatment of osteoarthritis, but it is rarely recognized. As early as 1930s, people noticed that obese people had a tendency to suffer from osteoarthritis. Foreign literatures reported that the incidence of osteoarthritis in obese patients was 12% ~ 43%.
Some people have collected the data of osteoarthritis patients for more than 30 years before onset. It was found that the risk of osteoarthritis was 1.5 times higher in men and 2. 1 times higher in women at the age of 37.
In the next 36 years, the risk of severe knee osteoarthritis increased to 1.9 times for men and 3.2 times for women, and 60% of overweight people suffered from knee osteoarthritis.
For overweight people, we should pay special attention to the role of weight loss in the treatment of osteoarthritis. Some studies have suggested that losing 5 kilograms in 10 years can reduce the incidence of knee osteoarthritis by 50%. Patients with osteoarthritis should try to reduce their weight to the standard range. The simple method to calculate the standard weight is: weight (kg) = height-105.
7. Relevant treatment is dispensable.
① Medical physical exercise
Carrying out related muscle exercises can coordinate muscle movements, enhance muscle strength, relieve joint symptoms, enhance strength and endurance around joints, increase joint stability, maintain and increase joint range of motion, improve daily activities, and be conducive to the recovery and control of diseases.
② The role of society and family.
Severe patients can be relieved if they get care, understanding, support and help from society and family.
③ Physical therapy
Physical therapy plays an important role in the treatment of osteoarthritis, especially for those patients who can not relieve symptoms or tolerate drugs, physical therapy is a better treatment. It helps to enhance the muscle strength of patients and improve the range of activities. Physical therapy in acute stage is mainly to relieve pain and reduce swelling, while in chronic stage it is mainly to enhance local blood circulation and improve joint function.
④ Protect the damaged joints.
Special attention should be paid to avoid mechanical damage of joints and minimize the load and wear of joints. For example, patients with knee and ankle osteoarthritis should try to avoid going up and down stairs, squatting for a long time, standing, kneeling, climbing mountains and trekking on weekdays. , especially when the joints are swollen.
I have received many patients whose condition has worsened after strenuous exercise. For example, some elderly people have to take part in the disco competition and practice for a long time, resulting in swelling and pain in their knees and inability to walk. In order to achieve the purpose of physical exercise, patients can choose swimming, cycling, gymnastics and other sports with light joint load, or they can use handles, crutches, knee pads, walkers, wedge-shaped insoles or other auxiliary facilities to assist joint movement.
⑤ Wearing shoes is also exquisite.
You should wear the right shoes. Actually, wearing flats is not the best choice. Because when walking in flat shoes, the weight will fall on the heel too much, and the walking time will be longer. The impulse to upload may cause pain and discomfort in heel, ankle, knee, hip, waist and other parts, which will lead to osteoarthritis for a long time and sometimes cause headache and dizziness.
Moreover, due to the reduction of the cushioning effect of the arch of the foot, improper stress on the foot is easy to cause fractures. Therefore, it is best to wear soft shoes with elastic soles, such as casual shoes with wedges, which can reduce the influence of gravity on joints and reduce joint wear. In addition, the heel of the shoe should not be too high, about 2 cm higher than the forefoot of the sole. Do not wear high heels. Because the elderly are a frequent group of osteoarthritis, in addition to paying attention to the height of the heel, the soles of the elderly should be slightly wider and have anti-slip ripples to avoid falling.
8. Cartilage protectant can be used or not.
At present, the commonly used cartilage protectants can prevent the pathological process of osteoarthritis. This medicine is a permanent cure, which can improve the condition of cartilage, restore the normal biochemical environment of joints and repair damaged articular cartilage. Many patients are not aware of the radical effect of these drugs and think that the therapeutic effect is greatly reduced.
Conclusion: People with arthritis always feel uncomfortable everywhere, sometimes it is osteoarthritis. After reading the above introduction, I have an understanding of the treatment of osteoarthritis. Every disease has a misunderstanding. There are also fewer misunderstandings in treatment in this article. I hope this article is helpful to you.