Are you facing unrelenting pain and swelling in your joint? Do you experience impaired mobility in your daily activities like walking, dressing and even bathing? Individuals living with arthritis face with a condition that knows no time, race, age and gender in its episodes of intense and disabling pain - all due to joint inflammation.

In a normal joint, the ends where two bones meet are coated with cartilage, which absorbs shocks and keeps the bones from rubbing against each other whenever the joint is moved.

In an arthritic joint, however, the cartilage membranes are inflamed, puffy and worn out. Inflammation may have resulted as a natural response of the body due to injury, and plays an important part in healing and fighting infection, but it can also be brought about by autoimmunity (when one's immune system attacks the body's own tissues).

Symptoms of arthritis include pain, swelling, stiffness and deformity of one or more joints.

The pain can range form tolerable to excruciatingly over a period of time, making it a highly undesirable experience. Alarmingly, arthritis is more than just a pain. It is a progressive disease and a leading cause of disability around the world. If left untreated, it is capable of leading to permanent disability.

Arthritis is spreading, partly due to an ageing demographic, and contrary to popular myth, arthritis attacks children too. So real is the impending seriousness of arthritis' spread that the years 2000-2010 have beed jointly declared as The Bone and Joint Decade by the United Nations (UN), the Vatican, 49 National Governments and 750 Organizations, to combat the problem.