Is joint pain arthritis? Almost everyone has had joint pain at some point in their lives, either mildly or severely, often or occasionally, and when joint pain occurs, people often worry if they have arthritis. In fact, although joint pain can occur with arthritis, the presence of joint pain symptoms does not necessarily mean that the person has some kind of arthritis. This is because: 1. Many patients experience joint pain that is transient and transient in nature. Although the pain does occur in the joint, the joint tissue does not show typical inflammatory pathological changes or the lesions are mild and transient, so in this case, the clinical tendency is to call it “arthralgia” rather than “arthritis”. For example, many patients have different degrees of arthralgia before weather changes or when it rains on cloudy days, usually without swelling, a few may have slight joint swelling, which is relieved after a few hours or days, and usually without any discomfort, and there are no abnormalities in various laboratory tests and X-ray examinations. This disease is named “rheumatic cold arthralgia” by Prof. Wang Zhaoming, the chairman of the Committee of Rheumatic Diseases of the Chinese Society of Integrative Medicine, and has been recognized by many rheumatologists throughout China. This disease must not be misnamed or mistaken for “rheumatoid arthritis”, because the latter is a completely different kind of disease. 2, some joint diseases, although also occur in the joint, and produce symptoms of joint pain, but the substance of the lesion is not inflammation. Synovial chondromatosis, for example, can produce not only joint pain but also joint swelling. Although phenomenologically it looks like arthritis, its substance is not inflammation, but a benign tumor from the synovial tissue of the joint. 3, Some so-called joint pain, the affected tissue is not in the joint, but outside the joint. For example, in the case of the well-known frozen shoulder, sometimes the pain is so severe that it can even affect sleep, and it mostly causes obstruction to the movement of the affected shoulder joint, so that daily life such as combing hair, washing face and dressing is affected. In fact, most of the tissues involved are extra-articular muscles and tendons. Although the substance of the lesion is inflammation, it is not called “shoulder arthritis” because it focuses on the soft tissues around the shoulder, but rather “periarthritis”, or frozen shoulder. In short, there are many diseases that can cause joint pain. To diagnose arthritis, two conditions must be present: 1) the lesion involves the joint itself; 2) the substance of the lesion is inflammation. Diseases that involve joint tissue but do not cause inflammation, diseases that are not inflammatory in nature, and diseases that do not involve joint tissue cannot be called arthritis. Therefore, those patients who have experienced joint pain need not worry because many of them suffer from “rheumatic cold arthritis”. This disease is not difficult to treat and does not leave any after-effects. The right way is to stop worrying unnecessarily, go to the hospital in time, and ask the doctor to help make a definite diagnosis as soon as possible, so as to strive for the ideal treatment effect.