Tag Archives: arthritis exercise

exercise as arthritis physical therapy

Too Few People With Arthritis Try the Top Recommended Therapy: Physical Activity

Physical exercise is recommended as the first approach for relief of arthritis symptoms, yet many people do not participate in regular physical activity. New research suggests that doctors and other health care professionals who treat people with arthritis are doing a better job at counseling them on physical exercise, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.

A study published recently by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that the number of people with arthritis who said they were counseled by a health care professional about doing exercise to improve arthritis symptoms increased by 18 percent between 2002 and 2014, from 52 percent to 61 percent. But that means that approximately 40 percent of people with arthritis who seek medical care still are not getting appropriate counseling at their medical visits. The findings appeared in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), published by the CDC.

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fibromyalgia weights

Top Fibro Treatments

If you’ve been diagnosed with mild to moderate fibromyalgia, exercise and other non-drug therapies should be your first line of treatment, according to the European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR), an international group of health professionals in rheumatology. EULAR’s updated fibromyalgia treatment recommendations, published in 2016 in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, are similar to the 2007 version, but this time they are based on hard evidence, which was scarce 10 years ago, rather than on expert opinions.

For the updated guidelines, researchers reviewed 107 research papers. Assessing outcomes for pain, fatigue, sleep and daily functioning, they ranked their recommendations of various therapies as “strong for,” “weak for,” “weak against” and “strong against.”

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CDC Arthritis Study

More Americans Report Arthritis-Related Limitations Than 15 Years Ago

More than 54 million adults in the United States have some form of arthritis and, for nearly half of them, the pain, stiffness and joint damage make daily life harder, according to a new report released in early March by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While the report notes that the prevalence of arthritis has not changed significantly since 2002, it does highlight a 20 percent jump in the percentage of people who have arthritis-attributable limitations in activities – that is, trouble with simple tasks such as lifting a grocery bag or walking a few blocks.
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