I stopped my rheumatoid treatment
A lot of rheumatoid patients come to the clinic for the first time. They say that they stopped their rheumatoid medications. They were supposed to drink those medications on a regular basis according to their doctor in order to obtain a good result from their treatment. Sometimes they even did this more than once. Also, they might keep shopping at doctors’ clinics looking for the better and more effective treatment for their rheumatoid arthritis.
One common reason for consistently stopping their medicines and for seeing more and more doctors, they say, is that treatments were never that effective. With more clarifications, we usually discover that many patients will judge the good effect of their medicines within two to three weeks.
There is important basic information here that patients need to know about the prescribed medications and the way they work and the expected time frame for those medications to kick in.
The first thing:
treatments start to work, meaning the first positive effect that you are expected to feel, will be within like six to eight weeks. This is the very start of any expected positive effect, less likely in only two weeks especially for non-biologic medications.
If, in two weeks, you don’t feel any effect, it does not mean the treatment has not made an effect. It means the treatment has not yet started to make an effect. This is a completely different concept.
But if it’s been two months or more, here we need to see our doctor for new decisions or for edits to the treatment plan.
Number two:
how do you define being regular on your medications? Regular means that if a given medication has been prescribed at a dose of one tablet twice daily, this means we expect you will drink it twice daily every day. If you drink it every other day or every third day or whenever you remember, this means the medicine will not work after two months, not even after two years. So, this is a very important point to keep in mind before judging the effectiveness of your treatment plan.
Number three:
We have to agree on a definition of the extent of improvement that we expect to happen when using a given medicine when it starts to work for us.
Some patients have such high expectations like they will be jogging within two months at a time when the doctor is hoping we can achieve somewhere between twenty to forty percent improvement depending on how active the disease was at initial assessment. And if this happens, the doctor will hope for another thirty percent improvement over the next two months again and so on.
If patients are aware of those three facts we just mentioned quite well, I think many patients will not stop their medications that easy and many patients would not go around to see more and more doctors and would continue to follow up with the same rheumatologist who knows the details of their condition quite well.
I hope this information was useful and helpful to you. take care.
This post was prepared and published by Dr. Hatem Eleishi. Dr. Hatem Eleishi is a professor of rheumatology at Cairo university (Egypt) and is especially dedicated to supporting arthritis patients with online educational videos and articles about arthritis causes and treatment. He also runs a rheumatology clinic in Cairo and a center for www.tabibakom.com/en that, in addition to providing online rheumatology consultations, also provides online medical consultations in several different medical specialties by expert consultants from Egypt, Canada and the United States.
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