Arthritis and current drug treatments

After class I was interested in what drugs were currently being used for the treatment of RA and how they worked. I work in a pharmacy and spoke with one of my pharmacists. He said that usually corticoids are usually used first, primarily because they are less expensive. Next in line are DMARDS, disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs. Common ones are methotrexate, hydrochloroquine, among others. Then after those are used anticytockines are used. There are two antibody drugs humira and remicade. Humira deals with TNF alpha. Embral is a "fake" TNF alpha receptor. So the TNF alpha will bind to it and hopefully be able to be stopped. Kineret is a drug that deals with the IL-1. He also mentioned that it would be uncommon for a doctor to prescribe a drug that would deal with IL-1 first because they are so expensive and its unlikely that an insurance would want to pay for one of them before something less expensive.