Learn how Fibromyalgia is diagnosed, including key symptoms, diagnostic criteria, and the tests used to rule out other conditions.
You’re not entirely wrong, but you’re definitely NOT right either. It really drives me nuts the way doctors and the general population misunderstand fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia literally means “muscle pain” in Latin. Of course, the muscle pain is real and it can hurt like hell, but it’s not a diagnosis. It’s like going to a doctor complaining that your head hurts, and having the doctor diagnose you with “a headache.” You’re no closer to knowing the…
My 16 years of experience facing Fibromyalgia and 30 years of CFS Pain medications taken too often can lead to a pain cycle, where every time you take an analgesic, the pain will come back sooner and stronger. Once you are there, you have to stop all painkillers completely. I just had my cycle restarted by a week in the hospital where they gave me Tylenol every 6 hours. That’s a whole bottle of Tylenol…
Although fibromyalgia symptoms are often written off as being sleepy, it’s really a much more serious disorder than it seems. With over 5 million Americans over the age of 18 diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, fibromyalgia requires more treatment than just taking a nap. Finding the right treatment depends on the individual, but the risks of not treating Fibromyalgia at all can be devastating and more dangerous. Worsening Symptoms A major risk of leaving fibromyalgia untreated is…
There’s only one thing you can do: educate, educate, and educate. Show him websites about it, tell him about it, explain to him how it influences your life. There’s only one thing you can do if he refuses to listen: just leave him. I’ve got an invisible and untraceable illness too. Mine is called Ehlers Danlos and due to firstly the limited amount they know about it, secondly the fact that they decided to diagnose…
My Age is 43 years and suffer from Fibromyalgia since 2004 I was twenty-two when I noticed pain in both my wrists and forearms during typing on my laptop. I was initially diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome, a diagnosis that made sense at the time—it was my last quarter of college, I was typing a lot, I also had a job as a barista working an espresso machine—but which later, I think, turned out to…
IMHO, I blame two things. Misogyny, and a lack of high-tech diagnostic tools. Misogyny: 95% of sufferers are women over “a certain age”! A lot of the medical cohort, particularly the senior ones were and still are male. Recent studies have shown that even today, a woman with chest pains, is more likely to be discharged than a man, and as a result, more are dying from heart attacks! Men don’t take women’s reports of…
Maybe the doctor you followed some patients with the presumptive diagnosis of fibromyalgia. And maybe after years of following them, and checking for objective signs of disease- lab abnormalities, physical changes, etc. your doctor never found anything to document a medical illness. But the patients always had the same complaints, always complained of fatigue, not sleeping, muscle aches and not being able to work (I am not saying that this is a description of many patients with…
Seem like? I hope no one you know ever has this awful syndrome. It affects your muscles, your nerves, and your brain. The pain is intense and fluctuates with the only blessing being there is no visible tissue damage. The brain has much higher cortisone levels with less relief and the signals between neurotransmitters get glitchy increasing difficulties such as muscles losing reaction time or function but luckily these as temporary and intermittent. One minute…
Let’s remember that despite all of our great science, we don’t fully understand either central sensitization or fibromyalgia. So the question is cute but unanswerable. Central sensitization means that there is altered processing of sensation in the spinal cord and brain. Imagine you have an mp3 player and you plug it into an amplifier and then to some speakers. The mp3 player is like the tiny signals coming **constantly** from the nerves that touch all…
Multiple doctors have told me I very likely have fibromyalgia (but my mother never took me to a rheumatologist), and I would say that I only am controlling to protect myself from being harmed… So I am not officially diagnosed, but doctors have told me I likely have it, as in a neurologist, psychiatrist, and a family practitioner. A physical therapist named Marcos who is not an MD, but knows my family, also told me he…