Making Patient Teaching Plans About Arthritis

Video Transcript

"To make patient teaching plans about arthritis, you have to consider what type of arthritis and what stage the patient is in. It depends on their pain, their swelling, how their joint integrity is and by joint integrity I mean, if they have a good joint surface because you can make 'em worse. Some patients can tolerate weighted exercise with resistance and that would be a walking program or with weights themselves. Some patients are intermediate weight level, they have to have some of their body weight removed off their legs or their arms so they are going to have lighter weights, or use an exercise bicycle. Other patients may be in an acute phase and be extremely painful or have a lot of joint wear and tear, so we use aquatic exercise for those patients in particular. The water depending on how deep they get, if they get chest deep or shoulder deep, it will remove 2/3 of their body weight and with resistance to their water, they can do an exercise but if they get to a painful point they can stop, and the resistance stops."