I shall good to see you thanks for coming in well i’m glad i’m here but i’m not happy i’m here i’m kind of glad and sad i’m going back where it’s big time and i’m kind of freaking out about it i hear you loud and clear we are not going to let you go backwards i’m gonna do a full exam in the other room but let me take a quick look at your hands and and tell me what’s
Been happening over the past couple of months well you can see tough tough to do things with these hands i just have been slipping backwards i’m super stiff in the morning that’s what we call gelling in inflammatory types of arthritis movement and exercise are actually helpful in terms of the gelling but remember you need to have periods of rest in between as well
Yeah i get that i remember you talking about that gelling sort of effect after you know periods of rest and things but it’s gotten to the point where i can’t really exercise i can’t do you know the things i was trying to do and actually able to do when my disease felt less you know active and now i’m just not doing the things i want i my dog walks are shorter i
Can see from my journal my doing things with my friends has sort of stopped i’m taking longer breaks at work and i feel i’m not as effective at work so i just don’t feel good okay that’s not good have you been able to take your medications regularly girl scouts honor i have taken my meds regularly in fact i journalize on that in my in my health journal so i can
Say look you’re dead in the eye and say yes i’ve been taking them faithfully okay cuz it’s hard to take three medications regularly it’s easy to mess that up so and i’ve been doing that great so that’s you’re doing all the right things yeah but this does mean that we need to make some changes in your treatment plan and where we typically start is the medications
Remember we got good control of this disease the triple therapy the methotrexate plus hydroxychloroquine plus sulfasalazine we’re losing some control of the disease we can get right back on it but we i think we’re gonna need to move to something we call advanced therapy it’s probably the best way to go remember your disease was moderate to severe we call it and
You know how aggressive it can be you felt it yeah and that’s why we started doing the triple therapy but i think that we need to move on to different treatments not stronger but different okay so i’m not happy about having to change cuz you know it it takes a while to accept but you have to even be on medication but i do i can’t stay like this i’m not i don’t i’m
Not willing to give up my life again now that i got it kind of back i understand let’s go in the other room we’ll do a full joint exam we’ll count up the number of inflamed joints look at your function and your grip strength okay and then we’ll make an action plan to get you back feeling the way you were okay
Transcribed from video
JointHealth™ Education: Advanced therapy for inflammatory arthritis – Lesson 1 By Arthritis Consumer Experts