Treatment Of Rheumatism - Injections

These take various forms.

1. Medicines that cannot be absorbed when swallowed:

Injection is then the only way of introducing the medicine to the body. Gold is an example of this: it would be given as tablets or medicine but for the fact that it would then pass straight through the body without doing any good. Another example is ACTH, which is used to make the body produce more steroids: it is rapidly destroyed if it is swallowed. Infections like these are just necessary discomforts which the doctors would avoid if they could.

2. Local anaesthetics:

These are substances which stop the messages about pain passing to the brain from the place affected by rheumatism. They do not alter the rheumatism: they stop you feeling it. They are the same as are used by dentists to stop the extraction of teeth hurting you. They have a special effect on messages about pain, greater than their effect on messages about other feelings. As you will know if you have had teeth extracted after a local anaesthetic, the effect wears off in a few hours. The extraordinary thing about local anesthetics injected into muscles and joints afflicted with rheumatism is that the effect often last not for hours but for days. It may be that the local anaesthetic cuts the vicious circle of pain leading to tension and tension leading to pain. This explanation is made more likely by the fact that injections of local anaesthetics work particularly well on the tender lumps of muscle affected by muscular rheumatism.

3. Injection of steroids related to cortisone into joints or ligaments that are inflamed

They act slowly, taking as much as a week to produce their full effect. It needs considerable skill to know where and when to use steroid injections to get good effects and to avoid doing harm, but they can have remarkably good effects.

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