Arthritis Chronicle

Today I am going to write about a recent paper that was published by Linda Li and colleague’s entitled “Effectiveness of the primary therapist model for rheumatoid arthritis rehabilitation”. In this study they investigated the outcome of treatment of people with rheumatoid arthritis by health care providers. The methods they compared were traditional treatments (such as occupational and physical therapy) with those carried out by a primary rheumatologic arthritis trained therapist. The latter method was first put forward by the Arthritis society of Canada and involves therapists acting as managers of a single patient, they are allowed to get advice from fellow therapists who act in a consultancy role, this means that the patient will not be constantly shipped off from one therapist to another. Linda Li and friends carried out an investigation of 111 patients who were undergoing either primary therapy (63 partakers) or more traditional arthritis treatments (48 partakers). The candidates were chosen so as not to have had any kind of treatment for rheumatism within the last two years, and they were analysed over a period of six months. It was found that in comparison to traditional methods, patients treated with the primary therapy methods suffered less pain overall than those who did not receive treatment. However both treatments methods resulted in a loss of pain from arthritis. So the adage is that any treatment for rheumatoid arthritis is better than none.

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