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Stories for Reprint
Pain: A Big Reason to Learn to Cope with Arthritis
By Ferdous Al-Faruque, MARRTC Staff
Arthritis self-management courses can help people with arthritis decrease their pain by 20 percent and reduce doctor visits by almost half. However, only 1 in 10 Americans with arthritis have ever participated in such courses.
"(Self-management courses) help people learn how to manage pain and other symptoms of their arthritis," said Teresa Brady, PhD, a behavioral scientist with the CDC's Arthritis Program. She says the courses are taught in small groups where participants are able to interact with other people with arthritis and trained instructors who can give them suggestions to help manage their disease.
To understand why so few people with arthritis take self-management courses and to find what could motivate more to participate, the CDC recently explored the issue with people with arthritis using focus groups.
"We had 72 people who participated in these focus groups and only 4 of them had attended this kind of educational course," said Brady, the principal investigator of the study. "The vast majority hadn't even heard of (them), in fact they didn't believe we were asking them about something that already existed."
When asked what would motivate them to take a self-management course, many participants said they would be interested in enrolling if they could learn to reduce their arthritis pain. More than half of them also said they would be interested in self-management courses if they could learn how to exercise safely, improve mobility, take control of their disease and were able to share their experience with other people with arthritis. Brady says that these are all aspects that self-management courses can help people learn.
"People haven't gone looking for (self-management courses) because they assume that arthritis is something to be tolerated, not actively managed," said Brady. "They assume if something like this existed someone would have already told them about it particularly their doctor."
The study concludes that health care providers and organizations that provide self-management courses need to do a better job of telling people with arthritis about the courses. They especially need to emphasize the benefits of the courses such as reducing pain, being able to be more active and remain independent.
The CDC has information on two self-management courses for people with arthritis, including the Arthritis Foundation's Self-help program and the Chronic Disease Self-management Program on their Web site at http://www.cdc.gov/arthritis/intervention/.
People can also call the Arthritis Foundation for more information on their six-week self-management courses at 1-800-568-4045. The courses are offered around the country at low cost and are often offered for free.
Living with arthritis is a day-to-day struggle for many Americans and is the most common cause of disability in the nation. Arthritis is an umbrella term used to classify over a hundred different diseases and conditions. Today 46 million people in the United States are estimated to have at least one form of arthritis. Taking current prevalence of the disease into consideration, the CDC estimates that number will spike to 67 million people by the year 2030.
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