What is arthritis education?
Tanya deKroo, arthritis educator and physiotherapist
Many people when they find out they have arthritis feel really overwhelmed, there's a lot of medical terminology that's thrown around they might feel quite helpless because they don't know what's coming next or they might be facing you know a future full of medications and treatments that they don't really understand or want to be part of and education is a really important step in those early stages of having arthritis because that's how you can learn about your treatment options and how arthritis is likely to affect you. Once you have that knowledge you have you know much more control and far less fear about what’s going to happen in the future and that for most people is a really powerful thing.
What is an arthritis education course/seminar?
Tanya deKroo, arthritis educator and physiotherapist
As a health educator when a person who's new been newly diagnosed with arthritis attends a course or a seminar in their local area they can usually hear from either a health educator or even a health professional about what it's like to have that condition and what sort of options there are to manage that condition so they can talk about exercise nutrition, pain management all sorts of different options for you to investigate to help you manage your arthritis.
What are the benefits of arthritis education?
Tanya deKroo, arthritis educator and physiotherapist
People can make quite big changes in the way that they feel and the way that their arthritis affects them in a fairly short period of time. For example, we've often seen people come into courses and unable to exercise or claim that they can't exercise because of their pain that means they're missing out on socialising with their friends because they can't continue to play bowels or to play tennis and they're feeling very isolated by breaking down the steps to become a bit more physically active to get a bit stronger into some manageable steps over a short period so, even just a few weeks sometimes they're able to actually make some big differences as to how much exercise they're actually doing and they can sort of get back into the routine or back to activities that they've actually enjoyed doing in the past.
