Pain is how the body tells you what you are doing is not good for it. You are supposed to be averse to the pain, thus causing you to stop doing whatever you are that it does not like. But sometimes, if the pain is due to illness or disease, the pain is more of a warning that something is wrong and you might want to go for a check up. Sometimes the disease gets cured, but the pain does not recede, maybe because the disease has already done damage that cannot be repaired, maybe because the pain is from a long lasting disorder that does not go away, such as arthritis pain.

The forms of arthritis that are not side effects of another underlying disease are many. Of these, osteoarthritis is the most common, with others including ankylosing spondylitis and rheumatoid arthritis. The joint pain that characterises all arthritis disorders is deep and nagging, often dismissed as stiffness that goes away with a morning shower, at least in the beginning. It may come and go, and while some forms of arthritis become worse with exercise, others are actually relieved.

However, if nothing is done to treat the patient the pain will get worse over time, until the patient may be unable to move the affected joint at all without a lot of pain. In this arthritis pain differs from sharp pains such as cuts and fractures, which are most painful just as the injury occurs and ease as the injury heals.

Arthritis pain is due to inflammation, damage from disease, muscle strain, fatigue, or just daily wear and tear of the joint. All the arthritis disorders feature pain, swelling, joint stiffness and a constant ache around the joints, usually localised to the back, neck, hip, knee, or feet.

The most common form of arthritis, osteoarthritis, is mostly due to daily wear and tear of the larger joints, such as the back, pelvis and spine. It tends to be a disease of the elderly. It cannot be cured, like rheumatoid arthritis, but physical therapy can be employed to help strengthen muscles and joints.

Patients with osteoarthritis are often in a lot of pain and need medication, especially when the disease advances and movement becomes extremely painful if not impossible. For very advanced cases, surgery may become necessary. Rheumatoid arthritis sufferers do not benefit from joint replacement surgery because their pain is due to inflammation, which will just affect the new joint causing the pain to flare up all over again. On the other hand, osteoarthritis patients will and do benefit from joint replacement surgery as their problem is purely physical, and replacing the joint will remove the problem, causing the pain to cease.

Joint replacement surgery may still be recommended for rheumatoid arthritis patients who have pain in their wrist, if simply because this will allow them to move this frequently used joint. For patients with pain elsewhere, other surgeries are available, such as arthroscopy, where a tube-like instrument is inserted into the joint to allow the doctor to see and repair affected tissue directly.