The Impact of Positive Communication with PsA Patients

Announcer:
This is ReachMD, and you’re listening to Beyond Skin Deep: Impacts of Psoriatic Arthritis, sponsored by Lilly.

Host:
Coming to you from the ReachMD studios in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, I’m Dr. Matt Birnholz. On this episode, we caught up with Dr. Joseph Huffstutter, Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine at Chattanooga. Dr. Huffstutter spoke with us about dialogue techniques with psoriatic arthritis patients who settle for poor disease control. Here’s what he shared with us from his rheumatology practice in Hixon, Tennessee.

Dr. Huffstutter:
What I really try to do with every patient that I see is to get inside their head and to be able to look at life from their perspective, try to understand as best you can what the world looks like through their eyes, because when you understand that, then you’ll understand their goals and their aspirations and really understand a little better what risks that they are willing to take to achieve those goals.  I know it sounds a little funny when we talk about risk, but everything we do in life has a certain risk to reward ratio, so that if patients are very phobic about side effects of medicines, we need to understand the nature of why they are scared of it and as best we can try to educate them as to what may happen to them with a particular treatment and also what may happen to them if we ignore those symptoms and let them try to live with them. 

One of the problems that I see in my area is that patients are very conservative.  And I don’t mean that from a political standpoint; I mean that from just a view of life.  They feel like that if they can just kind of keep things at status quo, they’ll be okay, and that they don’t understand that inflammatory arthritic problems, such as psoriatic arthritis, are progressive, and that even though they may not do anything because they’re concerned about side effects of medicine, the untreated arthritis can lead to joint destruction and further debilitating.  So that’s one of the things I really try to understand and educate my patients about is to let them know that even though they are doing their very best to stay active and move their joints, unless we control the inflammation, they’re going to have joint damage. 

Host:
That was Dr. Joseph Huffstutter sharing his dialogue techniques to help curb the trend of poor disease control for patients with psoriatic arthritis. For ReachMD, I’m Dr. Matt Birnholz, inviting you to be part of the knowledge.

Announcer:
The preceding program was sponsored by Lilly. Content for this series is produced and controlled by ReachMD. This series is intended for healthcare professionals only. To revisit any part of this discussion and to access other episodes in this series, visit ReachMD.com/beyondskindeep. Thank you for listening. This is ReachMD. Be Part of the Knowledge.