How to Alleviate Hand Hurts in Rheumatoid Arthritis

Q: I have Rheumatoid Arthritis and like reading a lot. Recently, I feel severe hurting when holding the book. Is there any treatment or device that can alleviate the problem?
A: Rheumatoid Arthritis is a systemic autoimmune disease. The disease can cause damage in various joints of human body. Currently, there are several methods suggested to you to alleviate your hand pains and hurts:
Western medicine treatment
Western medicines will help to relieve the symptoms and resist inflammation. However, some side effects may occur and the disease tend to relapse again and again and is hard to be cured. Long-term use may cause certain side effects, so the general condition should be monitored carefully.
Traditional Chinese medicine treatment:
Rheumatoid Arthritis should be treated timely at the early stage. TCM treatment can play a role in activating blood, dredging channels, resisting inflammation and stopping pains, thus effectively treating symptoms and driving away internal pathogenic factors that cause pains.
In western medicine, the medicines applied mainly include non-steroidal anti-inflammatory painkillers, immunosuppressants, and hormone drugs. Long-term use of anti-inflammatory to relieve pain medications will cause gastrointestinal bleeding, peptic ulcers, and prolonged use of immunosuppressants will damage the liver, kidney and other organs, suppress hematopoietic function of bone marrow , cause anemia and hair loss. So, for the treatment of rheumatic diseases, Hou’s therapy is suggested to treat patients with their individualized illness condition. Meridian guidance, acupoints therapy, moxibustion, fire needle therapy, Jiugong Huiyang therapy and drug iontophoresis are combined scientifically to treat Rheumatoid Arthritis. The treatments will strengthen liver and kidney, improve physical constitute and immunity, enhance disease resisting and drug absorption abilities. After this, systemic drug application, functional exercise and dietary instructions are combined to achieve the purpose of treating Rheumatoid Arthritis.

Rheumatoid Arthritis is a long-term refractory disease and will reduce physical constitute over time. The treatment effects won’t be obvious if the patients have poor physical constitute. Hou’s therapy considers the combination of physical therapy at the same time of drug treatment, and functional exercise and dietary therapy are also combined to get the maximal treatment effects.

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