If you've been anywhere near any media over the last several years, surely you've heard repeated exhortations to exercise. Get off your a-- and get moving! We've linked exercise to lower mortality, lower risk for diabetes heart disease & obesity, as well as less dementia, depression, disability & falls.
But for most of us, those conditions are way out there in the future. We still live with a teenager's sense of invincibility. That won't happen to me! That only happens to those other people. Which might help explain why so few of us exercise regularly as so strongly suggested. But what if exercise could bring about a more immediate benefit?
For instance, do any of you (or your patients) suffer from osteoarthritic pain, especially of the knee(s)? Enough to take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) that might lead (or have led) to gastric distress in the form of gastritis or even a bleeding peptic ulcer? Or perhaps an elevation in blood pressure due to chronic kidney disease? Or perhaps having failed NSAIDs, are now dependent upon opioids & their derivatives?
The good news is that in a meta-analysis published last month in the British Medical Journal, the authors concluded that a combination of resistance training, flexibility & aerobics was best at dealing with pain & loss of function due to osteoarthritis of the knee. The authors filtered the literature down to 60 randomized controlled trials involving 8,218 participants over an average of 15 weeks (ranging from 4 up to 79). The participants were mostly from the States, United Kingdom & Australia.
Granted, we may have some difficulty weaning someone off his/her narcotic, but that fact remains that we should make exercise the foundation to our treatment of knee arthritis, even before we pick up a pen to write a prescription.
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