It is a known fact that pain is the body's way of telling you what you are doing is not healthy. The idea is for you to take notice and stop doing whatever it is that is causing the pain. However, sometimes the pain is due to a disease or illness. In this case, pain acts as an early warning system, telling you something is wrong. But sometimes the pain does not go away.

Sometimes the disease itself has already gone, been cured, but it has left behind too much destruction for the person to go back to normal. Sometimes the disease lingers and does not ever quite go away. Arthritis pain is one of the latter.

There are several different types of arthritis - rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, septic arthritis, and osteoarthritis, among others. The one feature they all have in common is pain, usually joint pain in particular. It is a deep, nagging pain that often passes barely noticed in the early stages, stiffness that is put down to bad posture or having over-exercised or slept badly. It may be intermittent, and different types of arthritis pain respond differently to exercise - some types go away while others intensify.

However, if left untreated it usually gets worse with time, to the point where the person may not be able to move the affected joint at all due to excruciating pain. In contrast, cuts, fractures, sprains and most other sharp pains tend to be most painful at the moment the injury happens, and get better over time as the injury heals.

Arthritis pain can be attributed to inflammation, damage, strain, over-exercise, or friction. Common features of arthritis include pain, swelling, stiffness in the joints, and a constant aching in the joints, usually in the back, hip, feet, knee, or neck.

Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis. It is associated with aging, because it is caused by the wear and tear of everyday life. It affects the larger joints, such as the pelvis, back and spine. Like rheumatoid arthritis, it cannot be cured, but patients are advised to start physical therapy early in order to strengthen their joints and muscles.

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.