Joan Poe felt the first symptoms of arthritis in 1962, at a time when physicians typically advised people with the disease to avoid exercise in an attempt to "save their joints."
Whenever the pain in her knees got bad, Poe would put her feet up and rest.
"By 1985, I couldn't walk more than a city block, I couldn't sleep from the pain and I couldn't reach my arms over my head to curl my hair, so I cut it off," recalls Poe, 61, who has two kinds of arthritis--osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis--and a related condition called fibromyalgia. "I was sure I'd be in a wheelchair within a few years."
But Poe's rheumatologist urged her to participate in a study on the effect of exercise on people with arthritis at the University of Missouri, near her home in Columbia, Mo.
"People had been assuming the disability came from the disease itself," recalls the study's principal investigator, physical therapist Marian Minor, an associate professor at the university who holds a doctorate in human performance and aging. "We were challenging that assumption and trying to determine how much of the loss in function actually came from inactivity and deconditioning."
After three months of exercising regularly in chest-deep water, Poe could walk almost a mile without pain and could put her arms over her head to curl her hair, which she grew back.
"The exercise made a tremendous difference in how I looked, how I felt and whether it seemed like the disease was controlling me or I was controlling the disease," she says.
Today Poe works out at a gym at least three times a week, walking 30 minutes on the treadmill, pedaling 25 minutes on a stationary bike and stretching for 45 minutes.
"I still have problems with my spine when I do too much bending," she says. "But I can do almost everything I want to do. I tell other people with arthritis that if they don't exercise, they're a prisoner of the disease. But exercise will set them free."
Arthritis, which literally means joint inflammation, refers to more than 100 diseases that affect the joints and the tissues around the joints, including Sjogren's Syndrome and Scleroderma. Nearly 40 million Americans, or one in seven, have arthritis, says the Arthritis Foundation, a national nonprofit agency that supports research and provides community-based programs for people with arthritis.
