Yanjun Kong¹ , Qiande Zhang² , Muxin Wei³

1. Department of Chinese Internal Medicine and Institute of Integrated Medicine, The First Affiliated Hospital with Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210029, Jiangsu Province, China
2. Department of rheumatism, Institute of Integrative Medicine, The First Affiliated Hospital with Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210029, Jiangsu Province, China
3. Department of Chinese Internal Medicine and Institute of Integrated Medicine, The First Affiliated Hospital with Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210029, Jiangsu Province, China
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Clinical Case Reports, 2014, Vol. 4, No. 3   doi: 10.5376/ijccr.2014.04.0003
Received: 10 Mar., 2014    Accepted: 28 Mar., 2014    Published: 28 Mar., 2014

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic systemic disease in which immunologically mediated inflammation of synovia-lined joints can result in marked disruption of joint structure and function. In Traditional Chinese Medicine（TCM）, it belongs to "Be Syndrom", the outcome of the struggle between body resistance and pathogenic factors. RA is a highly disabling disease of which untreated patients show about 50% disability in two years. One cause of the high morbidity of RA is the long latency from the onset of symptoms to the definitive diagnosis of RA and the initiation of appropriate treatment. The difficult to make diagnoses of early RA since the early manifestations were atypical and the lack of specific diagnostic methods. This case is about the effectiveness of TCM treatment of patients with early RA which is reflected in both the diagnosis part and the treatment process. The patient in this case , Male, 56 years old, had been diagnosed of RA by TCM almost ten years earlier than that his symptoms could reach the Western diagnostic requirements. The important role of preventive thought -"preventive treatment of diseases"- in TCM in the early diagnosis and treatment of RA needs to be emphasized. It can be a practical way to treat RA with early TCM diagnose and treatment that impact disease activity and ultimately have been shown to slow or arrest structural joint damage, and then turn up to Western medicine treatment if the patient's symptoms reach the Western diagnostic requirements.

Rheumatoid arthritis; Early diagnosis; Traditional chinese medicine; Case report