Coping During COVID: How to Maintain Optimal Care

The United States has entered another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. What have practitioners learned from the first wave that can now be applied to the treatment of patients with autoimmune rheumatic conditions, such as psoriatic arthritis? Michael George, MD, discusses in this video from our sister site, the Autoimmune Learning Network.

Video Transcript:

Michael George: We’ve learned that the impact of the pandemic is much beyond the people who get ill, and it’s having a large impact on the patients that we see in our clinics. One big takeaway from this and other companion work that we’ve done is that there are a noninsignificant number of people stopping their medications.

It seems to be that people that we lose contact with that are the greatest risk. Making sure that we’re staying in close contact with our patients, keeping them educated, providing them information that we have, that maybe they can’t get from watching the news, or other organizations that aren’t focused on rheumatology patients, is really important.

Michael George, MD, an assistant professor of rheumatology and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania. He also serves as a medical advisor to CreakyJoints.

Additional Resource:

George M, Venkatachalam S, Banerjee S, et al. Concerns and health-related behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic in patients with or without autoimmune rheumatic disease in a large physician network. Abstract presented at: American College of Rheumatology Convergence 2020; November 5-9, 2020; Virtual. https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/concerns-and-health-related-behaviors-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-in-patients-with-or-without-autoimmune-rheumatic-disease-in-a-large-physician-network/