Rheumatism is any painful disorder affecting the loco-motor system including joints, muscles, connective tissues, soft tissues around the joints, and bones. This also includes rheumatic fever affecting heart valves. Rheumatologists are clinicians dealing with rheumatism, though the medical profession distinguishes between different rheumatological disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, gout, systemic lupus erythematosus, and so on in the medical literature.
One of the major changes in modern rheumatology is the development of new drugs called biologics, or disease modifying agents, which can control diseases more effectively.
Read more about this topic: Rheumatologists
Famous quotes containing the word rheumatism:
“While your rheumatism stays with you I naturally feel anxious to hear often. If you should be so unlucky as to become a cripple, it will certainly be bad, but you may be sure I shall be still a loving husband, and we shall make the best of it together.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Thanksgiving Day—A day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)