ROME, Italy—The medical environment is increasingly adapting to the possibilities of optimizing care by individualizing medical treatment and tailoring treatment to disease phenotypes. Data suggest that individualizing exercise therapy, an important treatment modality for rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases, can help control disease, maximize function, minimize functional barriers and decrease the risk of co-morbidity.1,2,3 Personalizing exercise…
When the local hospital approaches you about selling your practice and converting it to a provider-based outpatient department, you may want to hear them out. There are many benefits to becoming a department of the hospital, but what would it mean for you and the practice you worked tirelessly to build? What Does It Mean…
As the rheumatology fellowship program director at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Miss., Vikas Majithia, MD, MPH, trains the next generation of rheumatologists. With the help of funding from the Rheumatology Research Foundation, he has not only expanded the training spots for rheumatology fellows at his institution, he also provides patients with…
The meeting with something for everyone! Below is a sneak peek at some of the 2015 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting’s scientific sessions and content specific to each educational track. Basic Science Track Our knowledge of autoimmunity, bone pathology and other aspects of rheumatic disease is expanding rapidly due to the important research data produced by scientists…
Over the past few years, the ARHP and the European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) health professional (HP) leaders have met informally at the EULAR Congress and the ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting to identify a mutually beneficial project to be pursued. At the 2013 EULAR Congress, ARHP and EULAR leaders agreed to formally organize a meeting of…
We’re in this together for rheumatology and our patients. Those who know me appreciate my devotion to Duke Basketball and my pride in their recent NCAA championship. Coach K (Krzyzewski), a firmly established leader in the world of college basketball, makes the analogy that a basketball team is like five fingers on a hand, and…
One parent wishes that she could have consulted a crystal ball at the beginning of her daughter’s illness to have “some kind of idea of what we were in for. There are so many stages of letting go of the idea of what your little kid is in for in life, what they are going…
Ankle arthritis is a debilitating condition that leaves many patients in severe pain and greatly limits their activities. Until recently, the standard treatment for bone-on-bone ankle pain has been ankle fusion, or arthrodesis, in which surgeons literally fuse the bones of the ankle joint together. However, in the past few years, total ankle replacement surgery,…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—A Dutch study confirms that reduced serum levels of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) are associated with increased fracture risk in elderly women, but not men. In an Aug. 31 online paper in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Dr. N.C. van Varsseveld, of VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, and colleagues noted that…
How are Annie and Abby? That’s a question some patients ask J. Michelle Kahlenberg, MD, PhD, a rheumatologist and assistant professor in the school of medicine at the University of Michigan, who also runs a lupus research lab at the University of Michigan Health System. Patients aren’t asking about her children, but family members of…