Osteoarthritis: Why Your Experience of Joint Pain Is Research Data

Every figure in this guide comes from a published source, linked where it appears and kept in CureCircle's evidence base with the source's own words. It is not medical advice. Read on 7 November 2026.

Osteoarthritis is one of the most common reasons people live with pain, and one of the least measured. Most people are diagnosed from what they describe, not from a scan, and treatment is a long series of trials: exercise, weight, gels, tablets, injections, sometimes a new joint. Which of those helped, how far you can walk now, and what changed on a bad day are things only the person living with it can record. That is exactly the evidence research on osteoarthritis treatment is short of.

How many people live with it

According to the WHO, "in 2019, about 528 million people worldwide were living with osteoarthritis; an increase of 113% since 1990". The Global Burden of Disease study found that the age-standardised rate of new cases increased from 489.8 in 1990 to 535.0 in 2021 per 100,000 people.

The records worth keeping

NICE's 2022 guideline on osteoarthritis explains why your own account matters so much:

• The diagnosis is clinical: NICE says to diagnose osteoarthritis clinically without imaging in people aged 45 or over with activity-related joint pain and little or no morning stiffness. The clinic note that records it is your diagnosis record.
• Scans are the exception: imaging is not used routinely, only when something does not fit. If you had an X-ray or MRI, its report is worth keeping.
• Treatment and reviews: for knee osteoarthritis, NICE recommends a topical anti-inflammatory gel, with reviews as often as clinical need requires. Your prescription history shows what was tried.

Because so little is measured in clinic, the record that carries most information is often your own: steps from a phone or watch, a note of good and bad days, and what each treatment did. If you do not have your clinic letters, ask your practice for a copy.

What sharing it is worth

CureCircle values every contribution with a public benchmark built from what health data has sold for. A complete osteoarthritis story with the records the guideline lists comes to about $103 per licence on the benchmark today. With 90 days of step counts or activity data from a phone or wearable added, it comes to about $213 per licence, because daily movement linked to a person's own account of pain and treatment is evidence research rarely gets. Every line and its source is on the osteoarthritis page.

A licence is not a one-off sale: the same de-identified story can be licensed to several research teams, and you earn a share each time.

How to share it

You start by writing what you live with in your own words; a few quick questions follow, then an AI interviewer asks about the details only you know, and you rate every treatment you tried, from exercise and physiotherapy to injections and surgery. You can add clinic letters, scan reports and prescriptions as PDFs or photos, and the AI reads them into your own medical file. Before anything is shared, you read the de-identified summary and decide.

Start your story, or read what your health data is worth first.