Tai chi shown to ease pain from arthritis

Arthritis. Painful joints. At a certain age, your joints begin to ache and ache. It’s a product of getting older.

Animals get arthritis, too. Even the dinosaurs had it, according to the evidence. Can you picture a T. rex having joint pain? What happened to everyone around him when he got angry because of the pain? If that T. rex could have taken ibuprofen, everyone in the neighborhood would have been a lot happier.

NSAIDs are great to use from time to time, and I used to prescribe them to take every day for arthritic pain when I first started my medical practice. But over time, we discovered that daily use of those non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen isn’t the best thing for the aging body.

That’s what science is about, I always remind people — changing our approach over time based on new data. NSAIDs, when overused, have shown to have major side effects, including bleeding ulcers, kidney failure and increased cardiovascular risks such as heart attack, stroke and heart failure.

Tylenol — which is acetaminophen and not an NSAID — is OK for most people to take daily, up to 2,000 milligrams. But it’s not nearly as effective as ibuprofen, and besides, it’s still a drug.

The question that loads of my patients ask, and anyone with arthritis should ask, is this: How can I make my joints better naturally?

Enter a new study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, about knee arthritis and the ancient Chinese mind-body activity of tai chi. This research showed that using an app to practice tai chi worked to reduce the pain of knee arthritis.

Let’s delve into the research because a few of the points are rather important.

First off, it’s in JAMA, which is a reputable journal. Now, to digress for a moment, not all research is good.  Science is like sailing a boat. In sailing, to maximize the wind, you zig and zag, going back and forth as you progress forward. The same is true of science.

The research you want to use should be looked at by other researchers, free of commercial bias and not selling you something. That’s the kind of research I look to when making a conclusion. Also, the size of the study and how long it took are important factors.

And then there’s the question of whether it seems to “make sense.” When you see a study trying to sell you something, you have to ask yourself: Is this true or is it just junk fake advertising?

So, this particular study was in a good journal, with nothing to sell, and large enough, with 178 people completing it. This is the kind of study I like to review and share.

The research was a three-month study based in Australia. Everyone using the app to do tai chi was unsupervised, so it wasn’t a live, go-to-class situation. There are obstacles to live instruction — you have to get there several times a week, it often costs money, etc.

The control group had online instruction about how to do tai chi. Sounds like a typical thing I would recommend in the past. The other group was given a video-based program with an exercise app, My Joint Tai Chi, from the Melbourne School of Health Sciences.

You can Google this yourself to try it out. It’s a free app you can download that encourages you to do tai chi with 12 recorded 45-minute videos. For the study, participants received one video a week and were encouraged to do the tai chi three times weekly. Got it?

Because it’s video-based, if offers better instruction. And the app prompts you to keep doing it.

The primary outcome was less pain with walking and less disability with doing the usual things people were doing in their lives — working, playing, doing stuff around the house, etc. Those who used the app, watched the YouTube videos and followed the program improved much more than the control group.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Both groups improved because it turned out that both of them did some tai chi. But the app group did better.

Why? They had more instruction (a video is better than the written word here) and got texts and emails encouraging them to do their tai chi regularly.

My spin: This is good news for a anyone suffering from arthritis. We’ve known that tai chi is good for your joints, but we can see from this study that using web-based encouragement helps you stay on course.

By the way, more than 50,000 people in more than 120 countries, many of them lower-income, have started to use this tai chi program since it was initiated. That bodes well for tackling arthritis pain. Stay well.