What is a Sed rate?

Christina,
A SED rate (often ESR-I can never spell the E word) measures inflamation. It is non specific-meaning it can't tell you the reason for the inflamation-it reacts to inflamation more slowly than CRP. Most docs are using both SED and CRP to track disease activity. They are only one part of the picture as they are not always well correlated with how you feel how much pain you are in and other things. My doc does use them somewhat in treatment-for example she had told me to lower my dose of prednisone then saw my labs and my SED and CRP were still really high so she called me and said I could go back up to the higher dose of prednisone if I wanted to. High SED and CRP were also one of her arguements to convince me to try MTX. By themselves however they are not that meaningful.
I hope that helps
Oh Labtests.com (I think thats the name of the site) explains these tests, why they are used things like that so if you want more info you can google the name of the tests.
Sj