Modern Treatments for That Old Pain in the Joints By Ricki Lewis, Ph.D. The human skeleton and muscles help to make possible the graceful gyrations of the dancer and the prowess of the athlete, as well as the many more mundane movements of our everyday lives.
Arthritis is a disorder of the joints, the junctions between bones.
About 50 million people in the United States have arthritis. The Arthritis Foundation estimates that 70 million person-days of missed work can be chalked up to arthritis in the United States each year, as can 500 million days of restricted activity. It is not surprising that the rarer forms of arthritis may initially be misdiagnosed as one of these more prevalent two. Chris's condition was first diagnosed as juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, but the appearance of other symptoms soon led his physicians to suspect Kawasaki disease, a condition first identified in Japan in 1974, where several epidemics have occurred. Kawasaki disease includes arthritis 15 percent of the time.