Rheumatology is facing a clinician shortage, so attracting the right candidate for your practice may require an aggressive strategy, from recruiting right out of fellowship programs to offering student loan repayment and flexible work schedules…


Rheumatology is facing a clinician shortage, so attracting the right candidate for your practice may require an aggressive strategy, from recruiting right out of fellowship programs to offering student loan repayment and flexible work schedules…
Anne Harding |
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Ankylosing spondylitis (AS), axial spondyloarthritis (SpA) and inflammatory back pain are common in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients two decades after IBD diagnosis, according to findings from the IBSEN study1. Doctors should know IBD patients are at risk of inflammatory back problems, and refer them to a rheumatologist when appropriate, Dr. Alvilde Ossum…
The ACR/ARHP’s annual fly-in to D.C. (#Act4Arthritis) was a huge success. More than 100 ACR/ARHP members and patients from across the nation attended meetings on Capitol Hill to advocate for people living with rheumatic diseases. In all, our advocates visited 138 Senate and House offices. This year’s fly-in on Sept. 25–26 coincided with the second-annual…

Elizabeth Hofheinz, MPH, MEd |
It’s a bit ironic that when injured people are in pain—and their mobility is reduced—they are often expected to travel to a physical therapy clinic. For millions of people, such trips are a burden. In Australia, however, some patients are “letting movement come to them.” Novel research from The University of Melbourne shows that taking…

Payam Pourhassani, DO, MSc, Sneha Patel, MD, & Arundathi Jayatilleke, MD |
A 22-year-old Indian male presented to the emergency department with hemoptysis. A month prior, he had presented to an urgent care center complaining of cough with occasional episodes of blood-tinged sputum in the morning. He was diagnosed with community-acquired pneumonia based on a chest X-ray without laboratory testing and was prescribed levofloxacin. A few days…

In the next five to 10 years, the frequency of revision total knee arthroplasty is expected to grow 600%, due to the rise in obesity in the U.S. population and increase in primary knee replacement surgeries. Physicians can use different tools to help decrease the risk of premature implant failure and improve patient outcome…

H.R. 807, Medicare Access to Rehabilitation Services Act of 2017, will be one of the key issues discussed when members of the ACR’s Government Affairs Committee (GAC) visit Capitol Hill Sept. 26 during the annual Advocates for Arthritis event. This bill—as well as its companion bill in the Senate, S. 253—is aimed at repealing the…
MADRID—Research into pharmacodynamic biomarkers has shown that macrophages may have an important role in the pathogenesis of several diseases, including systemic sclerosis, an expert said at the 2017 Annual European Congress on Rheumatology (EULAR). The findings were discussed in a session that also covered how an understanding of M1 macrophages’ role in fibrosis has evolved…
MADRID—Researchers have found that systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is independently linked with bipolar disorder and say the findings point to a need for greater awareness of psychiatric problems in patients with SLE. In work led by investigators at Tel Aviv University in Israel and presented at the 2017 Annual European Congress on Rheumatology (EULAR), researchers…

Mark Vercel, DO, Kim Reinhart, OMS-3, & Amita Thakkar, MD |
As a manifestation of hyperuricemia, inflammatory bullous lesions have rarely been described in the past century. A more classic presentation of hyperuricemia is acute inflammatory gouty arthritis, characterized by the deposition of monosodium urate crystals. Other complications of chronic untreated hyperuricemia may include polyarticular arthritis, tophus formation and possible chronic destructive lesions of the bone,…