Marketing in medicine should be governed by certain principles to maintain the ethical integrity of the profession and protect patients’ interest, more specifically it should NOT be done the same way marketing done for “commercial” purposes, like marketing a car brand, or dishwasher detergent. For example, the “shock” or “exciting” tactics should not be used because they may cause misunderstanding about the nature of a medical condition, or trivialize the nature of the subject, namely the human health.

Over the last few decades several new medicines have been introduced into the rheumatology armamentarium for treatment of “arthritis” or “rheumatism”.

While these medicines offer better control for some patients, they do not add much benefit for a lot of other patients, but they may increase the cost of treatment substantially.

Properly done “and properly reported” scientific studies are the major source for “evidence based medicine” and are the main drive in medicine progress, however the impartiality of these studies are being eroded by the increasing effect of Pharmaceutical “Drug” companies and their money on “studies” and “researchers”, since these companies pay the researcher to do the study on their medicine, the researcher may become in many cases biased towards showing favorable outcome that help these companies sell more of their medicine, and may tend to hide negative outcome that can harm the patients but protect the interest of the company that paid for his/her study.

For doctors to specialize in certain fields, they have to go through certain training programs, then they should pass certain exams to become “qualified” for these specialties.

In recent years following a series of high profile cases around the world, where some doctors claiming to have specialization in certain fields were found to have faked their documents and caused significant harm to some patients and in order to protect patients from such scams and from substandard treatment by under-qualified doctors, different agencies have given patients the ability to verify whether the doctor they see is properly qualified.

“Rheumatism” or “arthritis” are general terms that mean “joint’s disease”, so they mean any disease that affects the joints, however many people associate them with the “old age” rheumatism, which is called osteoarthritis or the “tear and wear” arthritis, and this form of rheumatism is widespread because it will basically affect everyone after certain age, usually starting around the age of forty but it is only a small portion of “rheumatism”.

Vaccines are one of the greatest public health success stories of all time. They have dramatically reduced the spread of deadly diseases and saved countless lives. But with so much information (and sometimes misinformation) out there, it’s natural to have questions about how vaccines work and why they’re important.