pain in the absence of metabolic or Xray changes
Psoriasis, which in 15 % of patients results in “psoriatic arthritis” (this should really be thought of as another form of an auto-immune arthritis).
.....Infections that produce “infectious arthritis”, and can stem from bacterial, viral, and even fungal infections (to illustrate the many forms arthritis can take, one of the more frustrating problems that can hit a person who gets a salmonella infection, which most of us think of as just a form of diarrhea, is that after they get over the diarrhea, they can end up with a chronic type of arthritis).
.....The main symptom of every form of arthritis is pain in or around a joint, although often, different forms of arthritis tend to affect different joints.
.....Other common symptoms of arthritis include redness, swelling, tenderness, warmth around the joint, and as the disease progresses, limitation of movement.
.....How is arthritis diagnosed?
.....Not as easily as you think because often, symptoms don’t help much in distinguishing among the various forms of arthritis (not to mention that pain around a joint can be due to other inflammations such as bursitis), so we nearly always turn to tests to help us, especially blood tests, but the key thing to know is that although certain blood tests can add important information to the overall picture, most forms of arthritis require some kind of Xray or similar diagnostic technique for a more definitive diagnosis, and sometimes even the diagnosis is not clear unless a surgeon looks directly into the affected joint.
.....Now on to the worst bit to discuss, namely, the often frustrating reality that there is really no cookie-cutter formula to deal with this common condition.
.....That is, there is no one-best-way way to treat the many variants of what seems to be such a simple problem, which really means that every person with arthritis has to be evaluated on his or her own – which joints are affected, how bad is the inflammation in each joint that’s affected, what other problems the person has such as intense fatigue or sleep disruption, what can that person do or not do, how much pain can they stand without it affecting their quality of life - and then, an
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