1. Blindly taking Chinese medicine treatment
In traditional Chinese medicine, people believe that “if you have pain, you don’t have pain, but if you have pain, you don’t have pain”. Osteoarthritis is often classified as a paralysis because of the joint pain. This kind of paralysis usually refers to the external environment, such as cold, damp and other causes of joint disease, so some people also think of it as “old cold leg”. Modern medicine, however, believes that the cause of osteoarthritis goes far beyond paralysis to damage to joint cartilage caused by a variety of factors. If this is not fully understood, blindly taking Chinese medicine can lead to serious adverse consequences. Some herbal medicines for rheumatism have the effect of fighting poison with poison, but they can damage liver and kidney function. Some patients have taken rattan plants for arthralgia on their own, resulting in acute kidney failure. Long-term blind treatment will also delay the disease, so that patients lose the best time for treatment.
2, blindly according to rheumatism treatment
Because many rheumatic diseases have joint pain, so patients often subjectively believe that as long as there is joint pain is rheumatic disease before the diagnosis, according to rheumatic disease everywhere for medical treatment. Osteoarthritis is often treated according to rheumatoid arthritis. There was a patient, an elderly male from abroad, who had pain in the small joints of both hands for decades, and the joints gradually expanded and deformed. He sought medical help everywhere and was treated for a long time for rheumatoid arthritis, to no avail. It turned out that the old man was a pickle factory worker, due to the low degree of mechanization of the factory, pickles need to be manually operated, so a few decades of work, and finally due to overwork caused joint wear. He later checked the rheumatoid factor, which was negative; he also took X-rays of both hands, which were consistent with the changes of osteoarthritis, and finally confirmed the diagnosis of osteoarthritis. If this patient continues to be treated for rheumatoid arthritis, the disease will be added to the disease. Because the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis is long-term, patients need to apply non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs to relieve pain, as well as drugs to control the disease. These drugs, in addition to the curative effect, there are many adverse reactions, such as the impact on the blood system, the liver, kidney toxic effects.
3, blindly take “softening bone spurs” drugs
Many patients tend to seek medical help in order to relieve their pain, and look for drugs to eliminate bone spurs everywhere. As mentioned above, a bone spur is an enlarged bone, which is the result of the degeneration of joint cartilage, so it is also a bone. How can bones be eliminated by medication? There can be no such miracle drug in the world. Imagine if there was a drug that could dissolve bone, what serious adverse effects would this drug bring to the body? Therefore, it is completely misleading to believe that drugs can soften bone spurs.
4. Blindly supplementing trace elements (calcium, zinc, etc.)
Supplementation of micronutrients can be helpful, such as calcium supplementation for osteoporosis. However, the cause of osteoarthritis is not a lack of trace elements, so supplementation of trace elements does not have a direct therapeutic effect.
5. Long-term allopathic treatment only
Symptomatic treatment is needed to alleviate the pain of the disease. However, it is generally a temporary and short-term treatment, while many patients take non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs for long-term symptomatic treatment. These drugs are more familiar to patients with osteoarthritis and may be commonly chosen, such as anti-inflammatory pain, fotarolimus, ibuprofen, and fenpropathrin. While these drugs undoubtedly play a positive role in relieving the pain of the disease, they also have many adverse effects on the body. In summary, the positive and negative effects of these drugs on the disease are as follows.
(1) They can reduce joint pain and relieve symptoms, but they cannot solve the underlying problem, i.e., they only treat the symptoms, not the root cause, because they cannot control the development of the disease. Therefore, non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs should not be applied alone for a long time.
(2) There are more drug side effects. Such as liver and kidney function damage, gastrointestinal ulcers and bleeding, blood and nervous system effects and femoral head necrosis. About 50% of patients with non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs induced gastric and duodenal ulcers, bleeding or erosion have no symptoms, and even some elderly people have large ulcers in the digestive tract without any pain, and they do not go to the hospital until the digestive tract bleeds; some patients take non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs for a long time, which eventually lead to renal failure and need dialysis treatment; some patients also take non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs to make There are also cases of death due to brain hemorrhage caused by a sharp drop in platelets as a result of taking non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs. Therefore, these drugs must be used with caution. Osteoarthritis is not life-threatening, so do not get killed by improper use of drugs.
(3) Adverse effects on cartilage. Clinical studies have proven that non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs inhibit the synthesis of cartilage and can directly destroy cartilage cells. The site of osteoarthritis is in the cartilage. If non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs are taken for a long time, they can have a destructive effect on joint cartilage, thus aggravating osteoarthritis. The longer the use of non-hormonal anti-inflammatory drugs, the higher the dose, the more serious the destruction of articular cartilage.
6. Weight is irrelevant in treatment
Weight loss, reducing joint damage and weight bearing, plays a very important role in the treatment of osteoarthritis, but this is rarely recognized. As early as the 1930s, it was noted that obese people had a tendency to develop osteoarthritis, and foreign literature reported that the incidence of osteoarthritis in obese patients was 12% to 43%. Some people collected materials from osteoarthritis patients more than 30 years before the lesion occurred and found that men who were 20% over the standard weight at age 37 had a 1.5 times higher risk of osteoarthritis than standard weight people, while women had a 2.1 times higher risk. Over the next 36 years, the risk of severe knee osteoarthritis increased to 1.9 times higher in men and 3.2 times higher in women, and osteoarthritis of the knee occurred in 60% of overweight individuals. It has also been reported that because weight or load is mainly concentrated on the medial cartilage of the knee joint, which happens to be the common site of knee osteoarthritis in most obese people, suggesting that obesity may be a more important risk factor for severe joint osteoarthritis of the knee. Obesity can cause osteoarthritis, in addition to the weight factor to increase the weight of the joint, but also with obesity caused by posture, gait and exercise habits of change. For overweight individuals, the role of weight loss in the treatment of osteoarthritis should be particularly important. One study suggests that a 5 kg reduction in weight over 10 years can reduce the incidence of knee osteoarthritis by 50%. Patients with osteoarthritis should try to reduce their weight to within the standard range. The simple way to calculate the standard weight is: weight (kg) = height – 105.
7.Related treatment is optional
Patients often focus only on medication and ignore the important role of related issues in the treatment of osteoarthritis.
(1) Medical physical exercise.
Performing relevant muscle exercises to coordinate muscle movements and increase muscle strength can reduce joint symptoms, enhance strength and endurance around joints and increase joint stability, maintain and increase the range of joint movement and improve daily activity, which is beneficial to disease recovery and disease control.
(2) Role of society and family.
When seriously ill patients receive care, understanding, support and help from society and family, their condition can be relieved.
(3) Physiotherapy.
Physiotherapy plays an important role in the treatment of osteoarthritis, especially for those whose symptoms cannot be relieved by drugs or who cannot tolerate drugs, physiotherapy is a better means of treatment. It helps to strengthen the patient’s muscle strength and improve the range of motion. In the acute stage, physiotherapy is mainly to relieve pain and swelling; in the chronic stage, it is mainly to enhance local blood circulation and improve joint function.
Special attention should be paid to the massage must be operated by a specialist, do not blindly to the informal small clinics massage treatment. Because massage does not play a direct therapeutic role, if improper treatment, but also aggravate the disease. The elderly often have osteoporosis, if the massage force is too strong, often resulting in fractures, especially in the cervical and lumbar spine osteophytes of the elderly, more can not easily massage treatment, if the massage does not cause fractures, often nerve damage, and even paralysis, the consequences are unimaginable.
(4) protect the damaged joints.
Special attention should be paid to avoid mechanical damage to the joints, minimize the weight and wear of the joints, such as knee and ankle osteoarthritis patients should try to avoid walking up and down the stairs, prolonged squatting, standing, kneeling and climbing and long-distance trekking and other more strenuous exercises that damage the joints, especially when the joints are swollen should be avoided. I have seen a number of patients whose condition worsened after strenuous exercise, such as elderly people who had to participate in a disco dance competition and practiced for a long time, resulting in swollen knees, pain and inability to walk. Farmers in the north often do farm work in a squatting position, and osteoarthritis of the knee and ankle is common. In order to achieve the purpose of exercise, patients can choose to swim, cycling, gymnastics and other exercises with lighter weight on the joints, and also use handles, canes, knee pads, walkers, wedge insoles or other auxiliary facilities to assist joint movement.
(5) Wearing shoes is also important.
Appropriate shoes should be worn, in fact, wearing flat shoes, is not the best choice. Because when walking in flat shoes, the weight will be too much pressure on the heel, walking for a long time, the impulse of uploading may cause pain and discomfort in the heel, ankle, knee, hip, waist and other parts of the body, a long time on the joint adverse effects can appear osteoarthritis performance, and sometimes produce headaches, dizziness, etc.. Moreover, due to the decline in the cushioning effect of the arch, it is very easy to cause fractures when the foot force is improper. So it is best to wear soft, flexible shoes, such as sloping heeled casual shoes, which can reduce the impact of gravity on the joints and reduce the wear and tear on the joints. In addition, the heel of the shoe should not be too high, about 2 cm above the forefoot of the shoe, do not wear high-heeled shoes. Since the elderly are the most prevalent group of osteoarthritis, so in addition to paying attention to the height of the heel, the soles of shoes for the elderly should be slightly wider and must also have anti-slip corrugations to avoid falls.
8.Chondroprotective agents can be used with or without the present. Commonly used chondroprotective agents can stop the pathological process of osteoarthritis. This type of drug is part of the cure, can improve the state of cartilage, restore the normal biochemical environment of the joint, so that the damaged and damaged joint cartilage can be repaired. Many patients do not recognize the curative effect of these drugs and believe that they can be used or not, resulting in a significant reduction in the effectiveness of treatment.