"He knew the anguish of the marrow
The ague of the skeleton;
No contact possible to flesh
Allayed the fever of the bone."
— from "Whispers of Immortality"

Thomas Stearns Eliot (that’s T.S. Eliot of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats fame to those of you who were daydreaming during American and English Lit) penned those words in 1920. While the language of the poem may leave open The Real Meaning of the work, it’s a safe bet Eliot was not musing on the arthritis pains of the equine (even if he did write that book about cats). What a coincidence, though, that his verses so eloquently mirror the aches and inflammation of arthritic joints that plague man and beast–the heat of a tender joint, those horrible twinges that come on during wet or cold weather, the deep, stabbing pangs that occur with every hard footfall or bended limb.

Chronic arthritis was a miserable fact of life long before Eliot came and went, and remains so today. Yes, we have treatments that can assist certain types of arthritic conditions, but when it comes to the nasty stuff–chronic arthritis–cures still are elusive, with pain management offering only varying degrees of success dependant on the severity of the disease. Still, the book on arthritis pain management is a work in progress; future pages might hold the answers