Exercise is one of the best remedies to relieving arthritic pain.
doctor about your health insurance coverage, what you can afford and what you can’t, so that he can make the best recommendations for you.” This helps ensure you’re on a medication regimen you can afford to stick to—which is also the one that will help manage your pain best. Skipping meds or rationing pills is a bad idea; at best it won’t ease your pain, and at worst it could make it harder to treat later, says Lars Oster- berg, M.D., clinical assistant professor of medicine at California’s Stanford School of Medicine, and an expert in patient medication compliance. Sometimes your doctor can find a generic medication that will work just as well as a brand-name one, or he can time your lab tests so that they better meet your insurer’s guidelines. (Since many insurance companies cap the number of lab tests you can have per year, your doctor might agree to sched- ule your test for inflammation markers or white blood cell counts for every four months instead of every three. That will eliminate out of pocket costs, and ensure that you’re still being mon- itored.) Ask your rheumatologist if this is an option for you, and also find out about getting prescriptions for medi- cations that you usually buy over-the- counter. NSAIDs like ibuprofen and omeprazole may actually be less ex- pensive in their prescription form. Holly Roberts found the cost of her biologic medications prohibitive and decided to ask her rheumatologist for a less expensive, non-biologic medica- tion, even though the ones she had tried in the past hadn’t been as effec- tive. When she brought the subject up
a month. “People with RA can spend as much as 20 percent of their income in out-of-pocket costs for biologic drugs,” says Edward Yelin, Ph.D., a professor of medicine and health policy at the University of California, in San Francisco. But doctors don’t often take the out-of-pocket costs to patients into consideration when they write a prescription, says James F. Fries, M.D., rheuma- tologist and professor of medicine at Stanford Uni- versity, in Palo Alto, California, who adds that more patients should speak up to save money. “Talk to your
at an appointment, though, Roberts discovered she had more options than she’d thought. “It turned out I was eligible for a program through the drug com- pany that covered part of the cost of my meds, and I was able to switch one of my regular pain relievers for a less expensive generic version,” she says.
move your body.
“Exercise is the single best thing any person with arthritis can do to relieve pain,” says Leigh Callahan, Ph.D., Director of the Multidisciplinary Clinical