Osteoarthritis self-management
The importance of self-management
Matthew Williams, physiotherapist
Self-management of your osteoarthritis can be life changing. It encourages an attitude whereby you can accept that the osteoarthritis affects you, but it no longer controls you. Once you get to the point where you're able to independently manage your osteoarthritis by managing your symptoms and flare ups and pushing on with your exercise-based program you’ll be well on the way to managing your joint effectively. This can be achieved initially through close consultation with your GP, your physiotherapist and other resources like arthritis Australia.
Professor David Hunter, rheumatologist
So, it's important for everybody with osteoarthritis to understand that this is a chronic disease. There is no cure at present and that the average time course for a person with this disease. is usually in the order of about 20 to 30 years that they will live with this disease. It's important that they really get very involved in managing their own disease become much more engaged with the knowledge about how best to do that so that they can focus specifically on their attitudes towards the management of the disease and better optimize their own self-management strategies. Everybody with osteoarthritis should better understand the disease and how best to manage that and it’s critical that that they understand that that makes a big difference to their whole life course and their disease course long term. One great way for them to do that is to get engaged with my joint pain.org.au which has recently been set up with Arthritis Australia to help to facilitate better understanding of the disease and how best that person can actually manage their symptoms and the disease course long term.
One other way to do that is to get engaged with the forum specifically trying to understand the impact this has on other people who have similar problems to you. It's important to build a good healthcare team for the management of osteoarthritis because you can't do it alone. Most people it's really important for you to understand that self-management is critically important but it's also really important for you to understand that no man is an island and that for you, there are specific people out there that can help to focus down on particular problems that you might have whether that be lack of mobility, a lack of exercise, overweight and obesity for which there are different health professionals that can help best to facilitate changing those modifiable risk factors. In that context don't think of yourself as a person that can go it alone it's really important that you engage a good health care professional team around you and make sure that they understand what it is that your goals are, make sure that they understand what it is that you want to attain long term and help them to facilitate you reaching your goals.
For everybody who has osteoarthritis this is just a great personal challenge and for everybody I would strongly recommend that they take this up as a goal that they want to beat. It's incredibly important they be engaged in managing their own disease and managing the symptoms that come from osteoarthritis and never give up. This is a disease that can be beaten there are lots of great treatment options that are out there and lots of great health professionals that can actually help with the management of your disease. Never give up.
