SAN ANTONIO — May is National Arthritis Month. A time to bring awareness to the disease and ways to treat it. And the condition may be more common than you think.
People with arthritis feel pain and stiffness in their bodies, often making it hard to move or if they do move it causes their joints to become swollen. And the CDC says one in four people have it. Rob Wicall, who started a board for the local Arthritis Foundation told us, "All I've done my whole life is beat myself up and injure myself, right? So now I'm paying the consequences of all those years of beating myself up."
Rob Wicall was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a form of arthritis. But as the Spurs Coyote, a water skiier at Sea World, and the mascot for the Washington Capitals, arthritis was the last thing this very active man needed. Wicall said, "It's a form of arthritis, in which, basically, ironically, when you injure your body, it's autoimmune and it overly tries to heal and thus sort of calcifies joints over time."
The CDC reports during 2019-2021 more than 53 million adults were diagnosed with some form of arthritis, gout, lupus, or fibromyalgia. The prevalence was 24.2% among women and 17.9% among men. When it came to ethnic backgrounds 5.2 million were Hispanic adults, 6 million were non-Hispanic Black adults, and the largest group, 39.1 million non-Hispanic White adults reported doctor-diagnosed arthritis.
Wicall realized he had a platform, and turned his diagnosis into a way to help others. Wicall added, "I got involved with the Arthritis Foundation was simply because I thought, there's a lot of people out there who probably in the same boat who don't know what to do."
Wicall says if you think you may have a health problem like arthritis to hit that illness head on and see your doctor as soon as possible to get treated and improve your quality of life.