The War On RA - Part 1- Walk On The Moon Save
The War On RA - Part 1- Walk On The Moon by Dr. Cush
Transcription
The War on RA Part one It's time to count your blessings. It's truly a great era to be a rheumatologist in the modern world. It's probably a good time to also have rheumatoid arthritis if you have to have something. There are so many advances, so many people working in this area. The research is abundant, the funding seems to be limitless.
There are many who are concerned about the welfare of patients with rheumatoid arthritis. And I think that, you know, we feel good about what we do when we manage this particular disease. It's really quite unusual or really rare, rare, rare for me to not have a workable next option for a patient who presents to me with rheumatoid arthritis. I've been working in this field since 1984 was the initial focus of my research when I joined UT Southwestern in Dallas, Texas. And I thought at that time that the excitement, the research, the immunology, really we were was a great thing to be a part of because we looked like we were on the cusp of something truly wonderful about to happen such that it did seem that within our reach that patients would not have rheumatoid arthritis, that maybe we'd understand the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis and maybe how to treat it.
But what time has taught me is that rheumatoid arthritis is a whole lot harder than I originally thought. That breakthrough in the pathogenesis and treatment hasn't come to any fruition. And there are still many problems that we are faced with when we are managing rheumatoid arthritis. We're very successful at what we do. Each patient is a battle and we win many battles, but we have not yet won the war.
It's time I think that we as rheumatologists and leaders in the field of musculoskeletal therapeutics understand that we have beliefs that we are strongly tied to that aren't necessarily concordant with the truths that exist in the world of rheumatoid arthritis. RA is progressive. RA is deadly. The average patient dies at the age of 67, about ten years shorter than they should have died. The sad part is that the severity and the mortality and the risk of RA are often given very little credit.
We don't really talk about what's horrible about RA or our failures. We seem to take great delight in our successes and most of the world thinks that rheumatoid arthritis and gout and other forms of arthritis are lifestyle diseases, you know, inconveniences that make it slow to get off the couch or get out of a car. But it's really not quite that simple as you know, if you take care of these patients. We are dealing with RA every day. We are dealing with the casualties of war every day, and yet we are more enthusiastic about our successes rather than our failures.
Do we really need a war on rheumatoid arthritis? John F. Kennedy said in 1962, we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because the goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills because the challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one that we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win. That was 1962.
I was watching that on a black and white television about the size of a refrigerator with a screen about the size of my cell phone. I thought that was crazy talk, but it was exciting. And you know what? Within ten years, it happened. 1969, I was standing on the top of my roof in Merritt Island, Florida watching that spaceship take off where those astronauts walked on the moon.
It happened in ten years. It happened because there was a war. A war is a concerted effort by people who are aligned to tackle that which is incredibly difficult. It takes tremendous organization. It takes tremendous effort.
It takes people who really, really care. We could do this. We could actually beat rheumatoid arthritis if there was a war on rheumatoid arthritis. I remember in the 80s, famous hockey players coming down with non Hodgkin's lymphoma only to see them return a year later after they were cured of their non Hodgkin's lymphoma. Was that possible?
Pancreatic cancer kills everybody, not so much anymore. HIV used to kill everybody. It was the hygiene hysteria behind society. And now it's a cocktail and people live as long as they're supposed to live. Hepatitis C, the number one infection worldwide, it's curable.
How did these things happen? It happened because there were breakthroughs. Individuals. We have the science. We have the concerned individuals.
The question is, who's going to lead the charge? Who's going get mad about RA other than me and you? And how do we put our efforts to the good of stamping out this disease, getting better control of what we call rheumatoid arthritis? One of these nights, you're going to wake up and realize it's all been wasted time that we should have done the simple thing that led to the great outcomes. So this could be a grand new era, but not until we realize that the thrill of all our successes in therapeutics are gone.
Meaning we got what 27 new biologics, the vast majority of whom are biosimilars and me too drugs. We have very few new novel therapies and the new novel therapies that we have had have made a small dent in our success. We want to have many choices because we realize RA is many diseases. But again, if we want to win the war, it's not just about winning the battles. Ulysses Grant said, The art of war is simple enough.
Find out where your enemy is, get him as soon as you can, strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on. The war on RA is about to begin.
There are many who are concerned about the welfare of patients with rheumatoid arthritis. And I think that, you know, we feel good about what we do when we manage this particular disease. It's really quite unusual or really rare, rare, rare for me to not have a workable next option for a patient who presents to me with rheumatoid arthritis. I've been working in this field since 1984 was the initial focus of my research when I joined UT Southwestern in Dallas, Texas. And I thought at that time that the excitement, the research, the immunology, really we were was a great thing to be a part of because we looked like we were on the cusp of something truly wonderful about to happen such that it did seem that within our reach that patients would not have rheumatoid arthritis, that maybe we'd understand the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis and maybe how to treat it.
But what time has taught me is that rheumatoid arthritis is a whole lot harder than I originally thought. That breakthrough in the pathogenesis and treatment hasn't come to any fruition. And there are still many problems that we are faced with when we are managing rheumatoid arthritis. We're very successful at what we do. Each patient is a battle and we win many battles, but we have not yet won the war.
It's time I think that we as rheumatologists and leaders in the field of musculoskeletal therapeutics understand that we have beliefs that we are strongly tied to that aren't necessarily concordant with the truths that exist in the world of rheumatoid arthritis. RA is progressive. RA is deadly. The average patient dies at the age of 67, about ten years shorter than they should have died. The sad part is that the severity and the mortality and the risk of RA are often given very little credit.
We don't really talk about what's horrible about RA or our failures. We seem to take great delight in our successes and most of the world thinks that rheumatoid arthritis and gout and other forms of arthritis are lifestyle diseases, you know, inconveniences that make it slow to get off the couch or get out of a car. But it's really not quite that simple as you know, if you take care of these patients. We are dealing with RA every day. We are dealing with the casualties of war every day, and yet we are more enthusiastic about our successes rather than our failures.
Do we really need a war on rheumatoid arthritis? John F. Kennedy said in 1962, we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because the goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills because the challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one that we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win. That was 1962.
I was watching that on a black and white television about the size of a refrigerator with a screen about the size of my cell phone. I thought that was crazy talk, but it was exciting. And you know what? Within ten years, it happened. 1969, I was standing on the top of my roof in Merritt Island, Florida watching that spaceship take off where those astronauts walked on the moon.
It happened in ten years. It happened because there was a war. A war is a concerted effort by people who are aligned to tackle that which is incredibly difficult. It takes tremendous organization. It takes tremendous effort.
It takes people who really, really care. We could do this. We could actually beat rheumatoid arthritis if there was a war on rheumatoid arthritis. I remember in the 80s, famous hockey players coming down with non Hodgkin's lymphoma only to see them return a year later after they were cured of their non Hodgkin's lymphoma. Was that possible?
Pancreatic cancer kills everybody, not so much anymore. HIV used to kill everybody. It was the hygiene hysteria behind society. And now it's a cocktail and people live as long as they're supposed to live. Hepatitis C, the number one infection worldwide, it's curable.
How did these things happen? It happened because there were breakthroughs. Individuals. We have the science. We have the concerned individuals.
The question is, who's going to lead the charge? Who's going get mad about RA other than me and you? And how do we put our efforts to the good of stamping out this disease, getting better control of what we call rheumatoid arthritis? One of these nights, you're going to wake up and realize it's all been wasted time that we should have done the simple thing that led to the great outcomes. So this could be a grand new era, but not until we realize that the thrill of all our successes in therapeutics are gone.
Meaning we got what 27 new biologics, the vast majority of whom are biosimilars and me too drugs. We have very few new novel therapies and the new novel therapies that we have had have made a small dent in our success. We want to have many choices because we realize RA is many diseases. But again, if we want to win the war, it's not just about winning the battles. Ulysses Grant said, The art of war is simple enough.
Find out where your enemy is, get him as soon as you can, strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on. The war on RA is about to begin.
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