ACR Coverage: OA Management, Telehealth, Medical Marijuana and More
Our team of Patient Representatives and staff hit the ground running Monday to take in a range of sessions at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the ACR/AHRP (Annual Meeting of the American College of Rheumatology/Association of Rheumatology Health Professionals).
Donna Dernier sat in on a session titled “Moving Toward Better Osteoarthritis Management.” In it, Kelli Allen, a research professor of medicine from the Thurston Arthritis Research Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said there is plenty of good evidence that certain behavioral therapies can work to better manage osteoarthritis (OA), but the message is getting lost in translation to the patient. Dernier reports, “The good news is there are agreed-upon strategies that work well to reduce pain and increase mobility. These include weight loss, better sleep patterns, judicious use of pain meds, increased exercise. Unfortunately, compliance isn’t always as high as doctors would like. Causes for this could be: non-shared decision making, a patient’s lack of confidence in the recommendation, or perhaps difficulty in actually getting to [physical therapy] sessions.”
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