Your help is needed to improve healthcare for people living with spondyloarthritis.
Too often we face healthcare professionals with little or no knowledge of ankylosing spondylitis and related diseases.
Too many of us could have been diagnosed sooner if our primary care physicians knew the signs.
This petition is designed to help SAA advocate in several ways:
- We can use the petition list to persuade medical schools to improve their curriculum.
- We can use the petition list to persuade companies to fund educational programs, including CME courses on spondyloarthritis.
- We can use the petition list to persuade hospitals and healthcare systems to improve care for people living with spondyloarthritis.
Thank you for your support of the Spondylitis community!
We, the undersigned, want healthcare professionals to learn the basic medical information on spondyloarthritis. Spondyloarthritis is not rare. In fact, the CDC states 3.2 million Americans have it. 'One in every hundred people' means it affects more people than Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Multiple Sclerosis (MS), and Rheumatoid Arthritis. Yet, too often, spondyloarthritis is unknown to our doctors and therapists. Spondyloarthritis goes undiagnosed for years, even decades for some. The years of suffering and damage are particularly frustrating because treatments exist and are most effective when initiated early in the disease.