About Gold Treatments for Rheumatoid Arthritis

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Kayti Brosnan and I'm a registered nurse here in Austin, Texas and today I'm going to talk to you about gold treatments of rheumatoid arthritis. So when you are treating RA or Rheumatoid Arthritis you have a couple of different options and a couple of different lines. You are going to have a faster acting medication and then a longer acting because it is a disease, it's a chronic disease that is going to continue throughout a lifetime. So gold treatments are also gold salts and they're a specific type of treatment called DMARD or Disease Modifying Anti Rheumatic Drug and so what that means is that it is not going to act right away. It is going to modify the disease to hopefully prevent any disability or disfigurement from the actual RA so usually the treatments start and they become progressive as they go. How many times they are giving you shots is always changing for the first four to six months and that is when they will really find out whether the Gold's Treatment or the Gold's Salt is effective. It is given in two different ways. The first way and the most effective way is by two different compounds they use but you are not going to use both you'll use one or the other and that is through an intramuscular shot so it would go into something like your muscle in your arm and the other way is an oral compound of gold. This one is less effective and has a lot of side effects and what they've shown over time is that Gold's treatment is effective for some people but it has so many side effects and it needs to be monitored so closely that sometimes the benefit outweighs or the risk outweighs the benefit so they're not using it as much nowadays but it is still something that is used and that is a little bit about Gold's Treatment for RA."