How to Build Bone & Joint Health
Bone And Joint Health Articles > How to Build Bone & Joint Health
The statistics are staggering. With millions of adults in the United States as its victims, arthritis tops the list as one of the most common chronic diseases in the nation. More amazingly, half of all adults over age 65 have arthritis.
The impact of this disease is brought home all the more when you consider how debilitating arthritis can be. It can bring on excruciating pain in bones and joints, which can become so bad that people will lose some, if not all, their range of motion. Other symptoms include redness, swelling, warmth, and aches and pains.
Arthritis can strike any joint in the body, from your big toe to your neck. Wherever you get it, chances are it won’t go away. What’s worse, arthritis is a chronic disease that tends to get worse as time goes on.
The disease tends to get lumped in the popular press as one condition. Or you may know of the two main kinds of arthritis, osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. The frightening truth is, though, that there are more than one hundred varieties of the disease.
Each one has its own symptoms, as well as its own ways to cure and treat it. For many of these kinds of arthritis, doctors are at a loss for what actually brings on the condition. Others, such as osteoarthritis, are more understandable, preventable, and treatable.
Not Enough Cushion for the Pushing
Osteoarthritis, or OA, is the most common kind of arthritis in seniors. This makes sense. The disease is a sort of organic wear and tear. Just as the lawnmower, automobile, and other machines in and around your home wear down over the course of many uses, so do your joints.
That’s because each of your joints have a cushion in them called cartilage. This cartilage allows bones to move within your joints without rubbing up against each other and causing friction. However, after using your knees, your knuckles, and your ankles for years and years, this cartilage gets worn out.
That’s when osteoarthritis begins to kick in. The cartilage in affected joints breaks down, frays, or decays. It can get so bad as to actually have the cartilage disappear altogether. That means your bones are clanking together in your joints without any protection.
No wonder osteoarthritis causes swelling, pain, stiffness, and even loss of movement. When the grinding in the joints becomes too unbearable, osteoarthritis can even led to disability.
Though the condition obviously stems from very physical causes—the actual rubbing together of cartilage pads and joints—you may be made more susceptible to it by your genes. Osteoarthritis seems to run in families, especially in the hands and the hips.
Being overweight can also cause OA to kick in quicker, especially in the knees. And being a athlete when you were younger, such as a tennis player, quarterback, and ice skater, can increase your risk because of all the repetitive motions during years of practice and competition.
How to Get the Bounce Back in Your Step
Osteoarthritis can seem like it’s unstoppable. After all, it appear like nature has it our for you. Nature’s course seems to be to let all things wear down over time. After decades of using your knees, ankles, and hands, it only makes sense that they would be worn out, that all of the cartilage cushions in them would be flat, hard, or broken.
Though there is some truth to this, modern advances in medicine and the understanding of osteoarthritis have made some amazing gains in treatment. These include new medicines and herbal remedies, as well as some basic lifestyle changes that you can make to affect the course of the disease.
First, let’s start with the things you can best control: your habits. Consider changing your diet to eat healthier. This means taking in as many fruits and vegetables as you can fit on your plate, or salad bowl. Conventional wisdom recommends that you shoot for five to seven servings each day.
Fruits and vegetables provide many of the vitamins and minerals that your joints need to stay healthy—calcium, vitamin C, and iron to name just three. These nutrients help your body make new bone and cartilage cells, along with protect the cells that you already have.
Plus, a proper diet can help you keep the pounds off. As we discussed earlier, being overweight is one major way to increase your risk of joint damage. Talk with your doctor about how best to adjust your diet to stay trim and ensure you get all your necessary nutrients.
For treatments that could have greater rewards, but also greater risk of not working, your doctor can prescribe a range of medicines. There are pain medications that can relieve the symptoms. There are also steroids like cortisone, which can help with swelling. You may also ask your doctor about the latest herbal remedies, like glucosamine and chondroiton. Though the final results are still out on these, they seem to have helped some people.
Whichever path of treatment you choose, remember that you are not powerless in the face of osteoarthritis or any type of arthritis for that matter. Some mornings it may seem that way, but with the right lifestyle and help from your doctor, you could be on the path to bone and joint health.