Greetings from southern England,

Have just found your excellent newsgroup!  I'm posting on behalf of my
mum who is - according to her doctor - suffering from a severe
flare-up of arthritis in her back.  Like most 78 year olds, it seems,
she has suffered from attacks of arthritis from time to time, but this
is very much more severe than the previous episodes.  So much so that
she phoned me at 5.00am last Thursday and asked me to come over - I
live over 100 miles away and she has never done this before and hates
to think that she's causing us any trouble.

The health service here was excellent.  We had her in her doctor's
surgery by 9.00 am and he presribed valium (to help with muscle
spasm), dicloflex/diclopenac as an anit-inflammatory.  The episode had
actually started earlier in the week and she had been taking a coedine
based pain killer and paracetamol.

The is due to see the doctor again on Tuesday, but so far (admittedly
only two days since we saw him) the pain has continued at much the
same levels, although she has been getting more sleep than before
presumably thanks to the drugs.

My quesion is about the use of heat and or cold to relieve the pain.
Another relative who suffers from arthritis was advised by her doctor
not to use hot pads on arthritis in her hands and to apply cold
instead.  My mother has tried this but the pain is so intense that she
has reverted to using hot water bottles and a heated massage pad.

I would be very grateful for any thoughts on this: particularly on
whether heated pads are likely to exacerbate the condition in the long
term. I've looked around the web and this group and find the odd
reference to this.

Apologies for the length of this.  If I'd had more time it would have
been shorter, as someone once said, and currently I'm doing a bad
impression of a nurse!

Many thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

Andrew