Everyone knows that there is such a branch of medicine - rheumatology, and the specialist who works in it is a rheumatologist. What is the doctor of this profile treating? Most will answer that joints, and that’s true. However, not only the joints are in his competence. This area is much larger and is engaged in the diagnosis and treatment of inflammatory and degenerative-dystrophic lesions of the musculoskeletal system, as well as local and systemic diseases of the connective tissue, one of the symptoms of which is joint pain.
I must say that the list of ailments treated by a rheumatologist is very long and amounts to about a hundred diseases characterized by damage to the bones, spine, joints, muscles, blood vessels, internal organs. If the connective tissue of several systems and organs is involved in the pathological process, then we are talking about ailments with an autoimmune development mechanism. Rheumatic diseases adversely affect the quality of life and often lead to disability. They, as a rule, proceed in a chronic progressive form with periodic relapses.
Most often, a doctor of this profile is consulted for stiffness and pain in the joints. Such complaints are numerous and come from people of different ages, so today the demand for such a doctor as a rheumatologist is high. What he treats, we approximately know, and now we will list several diseases.
These are joint diseases, inflammatory and dystrophic. The first include arthritis: rheumatoid, juvenile, idiopathic, reactive, infectious, as well as osteoarthritis, adult Still disease , gout, ankylosing spondylitis. Degenerative ailments include deforming osteoarthritis.
The next group is systemic autoimmune diseases of the connective tissue, such as lupus erythematosus, Sjogren's syndrome, scleroderma,
polymyalgia rheumatism, Behcet’s disease, inflammatory myopathies (dermatomyositis, polymyositis), antiphospholipid syndrome, which will also lead us to a doctor who is called a “rheumatologist”.
What does this doctor treat yet? Systemic vasculitis is a number of diseases of various etiologies, united by a single symptom - vascular inflammation. We will name some of them: periarteritis nodosa, Wegener's granulomatosis, Kawasaki disease, Takayasu arteritis, Buerger’s disease, Horton arteritis and others.
Another ailment related to this field of medicine is acute rheumatic fever, better known as rheumatism. The disease is characterized by the development of a pathological process in the membranes of the heart, as a rule, in children aged 7 to 15 years.
What symptoms do we need a rheumatologist for? What heals, we know, now turn to the first signs of rheumatic diseases. They are described below.
- The periodic appearance of edema and pain in the joints (one or more).
- Morning stiffness and pain, which are observed daily for quite a long time.
- Limited mobility in the knees, lower back, neck and other joints, which turned into a chronic form.
So, what conclusion can be drawn about what a rheumatologist treats? The doctor deals with such organs as joints, heart, kidneys, blood vessels. After all, systemic diseases affect the whole body, are distinguished by a variety of clinical forms and are accompanied by cardiac, cerebral, renal, pulmonary and skin syndromes. Therefore, rheumatologists work closely with cardiologists, immunologists, pulmonologists, neurologists, dermatologists, and nephrologists.