Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic disease that requires long-term treatment, and every patient wants to know something about their disease and its treatment. Doctors want this even more, because only then can patients actively cooperate with the treatment and achieve the desired results. That is why we would like to introduce you here to the treatment of RA, especially why it is important to treat RA with palliative drugs? There are two main categories of RA treatment drugs, one is symptom relievers and the other is palliative drugs. As the name suggests, their main function is to relieve the symptoms, but they have no effect on the progress of joint destruction, which is what the people call treating the symptoms but not the root cause. So what about palliative medicine? According to the definition of the World Health Organization, the class of drugs that have the ability to stop the progression of the disease are collectively called disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs), or disease-modifying drugs. DMARDs play a very important role in the treatment of RA by inhibiting the proliferation of lymphocytes, reducing the production of cytokines and antibodies, and to a certain extent relieving the disease or stopping its progression. DMARDs play a very important role in the treatment of RA by inhibiting lymphocyte proliferation, reducing the production of cytokines and antibodies, providing some relief or stopping disease progression, and reducing articular cartilage destruction and joint deformity. What are the main drugs included in DMARDs? To be precise, they should include slow-acting antirheumatic drugs and immunosuppressants. Slow-acting antirheumatic drugs refer to hydroxychloroquine, salazosulfapyridine, penicillamine, and gold preparations, which are called slow-acting antirheumatic drugs because they start to take effect slowly after weeks or months. Methotrexate, leflunomide, cyclosporine A and other drugs are not very slow-acting, some patients can take effect 1-2 weeks after the drug, but their immunosuppressive effect is really more prominent, so they are called immunosuppressive drugs. Immunosuppressants were initially used for the treatment of tumors, then in organ transplantation to inhibit host rejection. In the late 1980s, new insights into the anti-rheumatic effects of immunosuppressants continued to emerge, and now they have become the main anti-rheumatic drugs.