Common Household Injuries during Winter

Over 250 people a day were hurt between November 1 and end of December in 2012 due to holiday accidents. Almost a third of these accidents involved victims falling off ladders. Many other victims injured their necks or backs.

It pays to know the common winter injuries so you will know what to avoid. Here are some of them:

• You could break your wrist, hand, ankle, or other bone in the body if you fall off a ladder while trying to remove snow from a roof. It is also possible to tear a meniscus in the knee or dislocate a joint such as a shoulder or hip bone.
• You could herniate a disc or strain a neck or back muscle while shoveling snow from the driveway or the sidewalk.
• Planning to remove snow from your property quickly? This increased activity may lead to an impingement in the shoulder or acute tendinitis in the knee.

Household safety should always be a major consideration during the cold season. If you do end up with an injury during the winter, don’t allow the condition to worsen. Visit a reputable orthopedic center as soon as possible so a doctor can evaluate your injury and recommend the appropriate treatment.

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Controlling Rheumatoid Arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a disease of the immune system that inflames the joints of the body. If you have been diagnosed with RA recently, it’s important to gain the upper hand over the disease as soon as you can. If left untreated, RA can affect your ability to work, impact your quality of life, and increase your risk for heart disease

RA is a chronic disease, meaning it can’t be cured. It is the most common autoimmune disease affecting the joints— anyone can get it, but it’s more prominent in middle-age patients. In the U.S. the risk of developing RA is 3.6 percent in women and 1.7 percent in men.

Although there is no cure for RA, its impact can be significantly reduced through early diagnosis and effective treatments. Many drug therapies are now available to treat the disease, so the challenge is finding the one that’s right for you. To begin a drug therapy treatment, you should first talk to a rheumatologist who can design a treatment plan based on his physical evaluation and your body’s response to medication.

Surgery is another way to relieve RA symptoms. Surgery for RA is mainly performed to improve function of severely deformed joints that don’t respond to drug or physical therapy. Surgeries for people who have severe RA include arthroscopy, synovectomy, arthroplasty, cervical spine fusion, and resection of metatarsal heads.

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