In our work we have often dealt with patients who were diagnosed with “rheumatic or rheumatoid arthritis” in rural basic medical units or certain hospitals. A minority of those patients did have rheumatoid arthritis, but most of them did not improve with anti-rheumatic pharmacotherapy for multiple years; instead, their conditions worsened increasingly. Some of them had a bent waist and hunched back such that they could not manage their own life, and some patients had even progressed to paral
I. Pathological basis and X-ray signs of fluorine-associated arthropathy
Long-term uptake of excessive fluorine may cause pathological changes of bone structure and bone periphery; furthermore, animal experiments and epidemiological investigations demonstrate that fluorosis may cause necrosis, degeneration and ulceration of articular cartilage, and also cause necrosis of subchondral bones, leading to hypertrophy of synovium and joint capsule and a series of reparative changes which will resul
