Last week, the world reeled when hearing of Glenn Frey’s death from complications of RA and other medical conditions. The news hit the RA community especially hard, and there was a lot of anxious talk about the mortality risks associated with this disease. How do you live well with RA when you know the disease has a mortality risk? I wrote about that for my blog The Seated View. You may also want to read the column I wrote for HealthCentral about how I, as someone who lives with RA, reacted to Glenn Frey’s death.

I also want to touch on the issue of RA meds. Irving Azoff, Mr. Frey’s Manager, claimed that it was the medications that were the cause of death. In my opinion, this was an unnecessary muddying of the waters. RA meds can, like all other medications, have potentially serious side effects. We take them because untreated RA has very definite serious effects. It’s important to remember that even if the medications contributed to his medical situation, it was RA that necessitated him taking them. Therefore, as Rick Phillips said in his letter to Mr. Azoff, RA was most definitely the cause of death.