How Is Rheumatoid Arthritis Treated?

Therapy for Rheumatoid Arthritis encompasses the use of a group of medicines which we call DMARDS, D M A R D S, which stands for Disease Modifying Anti Rheumatic Drugs. This nomenclature is actually very important because what we're hoping to do by treating Rheumatoid Arthritis is slow down the progression of the disease as well as reverse them the joint damage that may have already occurred at the time we first see our patients.

So these patients are not just treated symptomatically with anti inflammatories, or steroids, but we are using medicines to treat them that again we hope we'll slow the down the progression of their disease. There's a group of medicines which are called The Traditional DMARDs. Those medicines may plaquenil, arava, methotrexate, sulfasalazine as well as newer medicines which are broadly termed biologic DMARDs.

These medicines have actually been around for quite sometime right now examples which you have seen on commercials include enbrel, humira and remicade. Biologic medicines are as they are named, biologically engineered in the laboratory, to specifically target certain pathways tha we know exist in Rheumatoid Arthritis, and they can be very effective and helping reduce the signs symptoms of the disease as well as to [xx].