Jane L. Delgado - The Buena Salud Guide to Arthritis and Your Life

T aking a walk. Twisting the top off a bottle of aspirin. Gripping a pen. Playing with your children or grandchildren. These are the activities of life many of us take for granted. But for more than 50 million people with arthritis, many of the tasks and joys of daily life can be a challenge.

Those challenges can be made easier. Understanding the challenges and changes arthritis brings can help us live our lives to the fullest. Thats why The Buena Salud Guide to Arthritis and Your Life deserves a place in every American household. It offers hope.

It is a must-read guide to preventing, managing, and living a full and healthy life with arthritis. Dr. Jane Delgado offers caring advice filled with common sense and empathy. This is the kind of advice you would expect from a best friend, except this best friend also happens to be one of our nations leading health experts.

In this volume of her Buena Salud Guide series, Dr. Delgado reminds us all that when it comes to arthritis, movement is the best medicine. She walks the reader through the most common questions people have about arthritis, a disease that can strike people of all ages and is the leading cause of disability in our nation.

With her 10-Point Program for Health and Wellness, Dr. Delgado offers us all steps we can take and help our loved ones to take for better health. She helps readers understand how arthritis can affect other chronic conditions, your stress and mood, and your relationships.

Dr. Delgado knows that some of the best advice on arthritis comes from those who have already walked in your shoes. She offers the wisdom of the real-life stories of those living with arthritis and their loved ones. Reading the stories is an inspiration. You know you are not alone in your journey to good health and that there are practical solutions to making every aspect of your life easier and better.

Those stories are woven together with the latest in science and medicine. Dr. Delgado demystifies what can be a confusing diagnosis with easy-to-follow descriptions of conditions, diagnostic terms, and treatments. She offers tools for being an advocate for your, or a loved ones, best health by providing questions to ask your health provider, tools for tracking your health status, and guides to medication.

Dr. Delgado also identifies websites and helplines for more information that you can trust. The best sources for information, finding a health provider, local support groups, help with the cost of care, and other critical issues are all here and organized in an easy-to-use format. This is a book you will refer to over and over again.

The Buena Salud Guide to Arthritis and Your Life is an indispensable road map for those with arthritis and their loved ones to living their best lives.

D R . J OHN H. K LIPPEL
P RESIDENT AND CEO
A RTHRITIS F OUNDATION

I know when my neck started to hurt. Years ago I had been working long hours and to save time I decided to carry all of my supplies in two bagsone on each shoulder. Then one day as I was running from one job to the next I felt excruciating pain and that was the start of this situation. It seems like I have always had this pain.

Roberto

A rthritis is one of the conditions that is taken for granted because it does not kill you. Too often the focus is on diseases that kill us rather than conditions that can compromise how we live. When arthritis is ignored, the consequences will be negative on many aspects of our lives. If you or someone you know has arthritis, you need to know what you can do to make life easier.

For many people the first sign of arthritis starts with pain in one knee. For others the pain is in the hip, hands, wrist, or the back of the neck. What you feel is a sharp pain in one of your joints.

Usually you can find an explanation for the pain you feelyou injured yourself or you did too much of some activity. In most instances you take care of the pain by resting and taking a couple of pills you can buy without a prescription. You tell yourself that the pain is nothing or that maybe you have a touch of arthritis. You shrug your shoulders and keep on going.

But pain is a symptom that should signal that something might be more complicated than it appears. This is especially true as that touch of self-diagnosed arthritis you downplay becomes harder to ignore. As the pain and discomfort become intense or occur more often, you may feel that you do not have to see your health care provider because you assume it is just arthritis.

In many ways, however, believing you have arthritis is like knowing you have a fever. While it is good to know when your temperature is above normal, what you really need to know is what made your temperature go up.

That is why you need to see your health care provider to determine what condition is causing the pain and inflammation in your joints. There are nearly 100 conditions that can cause arthritis and knowing which one you have is essential. An accurate diagnosis will ensure that you receive the treatment that is best for you.