Foreword

Excerpt

From the perspective of someone who began to focus on rheumatoid arthritis (RA) almost 25 years ago, the progress made by the research community over the last few years in the treatment of RA has been astounding. In the beginning, few therapeutic agents were effective, joint replacement surgery was just beginning to be widely diffused, and there were only crude tools to measure outcomes (and little notion about what to measure). Compared with the contemporary situation, good outcomes were more the result of good luck, an almost haphazard choice of a particular outcome to measure, or more nefariously, the purposeful choice of an outcome to make a treatment appear to be efficacious. …