Access to medical care is another important factor to maintaining health, as is teaching people what they can personally do to control their disease, notes Dr. Callahan. Her research showed that intervention with self-management programs can help people battling arthritis to reduce feelings of helplessness and lack of control. People feel empowered once they learn that being more physically active can reduce fatigue and stiffness.
Courses based on social cognitive theory can greatly impact how a person deals with disease. Add to that concept the tools that teach specific disease management techniques, and good results increase greatly, says Dr. Callahan.
“Say someone wanted to start to be a little more physically active … but they felt overwhelmed about going to a class, didn’t want to put on spandex, or they didn’t have the money to join the gym,” Dr. Callahan gives as an example. “Well, in an arthritis self-management course, they teach people the tools to say ‘Ok, so you want to become physically active? What do you think you can do in the next week? Could you walk 10 minutes every other day?’ ”
These types of interventions “help people chop down a long-term goal into manageable bits that they can achieve and then build on,” she says. “They help people learn to set goals, realistic achievable goals in a certain amount of time.”
More recently, Dr. Callahan has aimed her research radar on the many health benefits of physical activity, a topic that she relates to on a personal level. She plays tennis, loves nature walks, and often plans outdoor adventure vacations with her husband to places where scuba diving is high on the agenda. “From a public health perspective, I really like the idea of thinking about … interventions that are outside the medical system that people can do that will make a difference in the outcomes of their arthritis.”
Dr. Callahan conducted four intervention trials over the past eight years as part of her research to look at how physical activity relates to arthritis and other chronic diseases. “It improves people’s arthritis, it helps individuals who have diabetes [and] cardiovascular diseases. It reduces obesity. It’s a very nice intervention,” says Dr. Callahan.
People who incorporate physical activity as a regular routine improve both physically and mentally because they experience less depression, says Dr. Callahan. “It’s the pain reliever without pills,” she says, stopping midsentence to correct herself “or you know, as an interim. I’m not saying don’t take the medicine. I think that’s very important. I just like the idea of something that can be positive for people in a number of areas.”
