VIDEO: Raising awareness of RA

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify cperla@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

So I've been thinking about this because basically patients get RA maybe in their teens or as kids but a lot of them get 'em in their 20s and 30s. And they're young women and we're gonna be treating for 40, 50 years of disease. Maybe we don't think about that right away and we think about how many different classes of therapies we have in rheumatoid arthritis, which is really nice. And of course, it's made us jealous of those choices with some of our other diseases but that's starting to change.

But it's a little like quite a few years ago when we had all these different non-steroidals. And people would get like two-week samples of a non-steroidal and they'd try it. And they didn't think it did enough. Then they'd come back and get a different one. And you could cycle through all of them really very quickly. And you could show a slide of all the different colors of the pills and the capsules and everything else. But the point was that actually that wasn't probably long enough to really know how well they were gonna respond.

And so I worry that we may be cycling our patients too quickly through these different classes of therapies. And that's a problem because we're not going to be able to really rely on the fact that as in the past 20, almost 30 years now, we've gotten all these five different classes of therapies. We have to be careful that maybe we won't have so many options going forward. Certainly if we ever can get a cure, that's going to change everything.

But I think it's important to be careful with a patient not to put their expectations too high, not to tell them that they'll know immediately within a couple of weeks whether they're feeling better or not and also to be reassuring about the kind of side effects they might experience but not to be overly cautious because then patients are afraid of what they don't know versus the therapy that they've become familiar with.

And so then you worry about are they not going to be willing to switch if you think it's time for them to add or switch? So what's my advice? Be a good rheumatologist. Think about how you can talk with your patients and do shared decision-making but please don't cycle through therapies too quickly because I worry still that we may not have all the types of therapies we need for each of our individual patients and also that we don't make them fearful of adding or switching therapies so that they can have more confidence in their ability to get better.