This condition also makes you terribly dependent on your loved ones. Your relatives and friends may understand you at first, but after awhile even they would start complaining about your dependence.



Thus, having to live with arthritic pain may become depressing and lonely. People who are afflicted with severe pain cannot socialize anymore and participate in their once favorite activities and past times. Some also become quite irritable that even their loved ones and friends tend to shy away from them.

This situation among people with arthritis is understandable. Having limited mobility and losing the smooth coordination and motor function of your body really limits you a lot from performing even the simplest everyday activities.

However, there is hope for arthritic people to regain their abilities in performing everyday tasks.

The answer is for them to undergo treatment that focus on psychosocial issues of being afflicted by arthritis, as early as possible. In the long run, this kind of treatment may mean a lot to the life of an arthritic person.

This treatment is an early-intervention approach that could help a person with arthritis about their coping problems, according to Francis Keefe, Ph.D., review co-author from the Duke University Medical Center.

In the review, 27 persons were picked randomly out of 3, 409 patients who have osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis. The purpose for this is to look at how the pain they feel is affected by psychosocial interventions.

The review is part of a series in the journal Health Psychology. The evidence based review focuses on certain psychological assessment in the circumstance of a disease and find out how to use them in order to reduce the effects of the disease.

According to the turn-out of the review, it appeared that cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is a treatment focusing on eliminating unhealthy thoughts helps greatly in managing the pain afflicting persons with arthritis.

Among the most beneficial of the therapy is the training for coping skills like relaxation techniques and daily pacing activities. Others include stress management, biofeedback, emotional revelation, psychodynamic therapy and hypnosis.

Persons with arthritis who were given the interventions treatment according to counseling and coping skills reported that they felt more relaxed, uplifted and alive.

Meanwhile, those who received psychological treatments clearly experienced that their physical disability and pain were significantly reduced

In the U.S., over 43 million adults are afflicted with arthritis along with necessary medical diagnosis. Meanwhile some 23 million adults report that they are feeling the symptoms of arthritis.

Now, with the important discovery of cognitive – behavioral therapy, there might just be help still for persons with arthritis.