Celebrate the resilience of Fibromyalgia warriors, sharing stories of strength, tips for managing symptoms, and resources for support and empowerment.
One of the best ways to ease anxiety about a major event, like surgery, is to plan ahead. Conversations about postsurgical pain management need to happen before your procedure, so you can focus on your recovery after surgery is complete. Here are 9 questions you should ask your attending health care professional before having surgery. What should I do before my surgery? Make sure you understand your health care provider’s instructions about eating and drinking.…
This Mother’s Day, take pity on the woman who cooks, cleans, shops, fusses and worries over you. Before you overwhelm her with breakfast in bed, let her sleep in. It’s no secret that women are chronically sleep deprived, and moms, especially working moms, are at the top of that list. According to a survey conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, almost three out of four American women between the ages of 30 and 60 don’t…
Fibromyalgia patients, who suffer pain in the muscles, joints, ligaments and tendons, are not all the same and can be classified into three distinct subgroups, a new study suggests. Researchers from the University of Michigan and other institutions are hopeful the discovery, published in October’s issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism, will help to better tailor treatment for the chronic disorder. “Fibromyalgia patients are such a diverse group of patients, they cannot all be the same,”…
Negative emotions increase pain responses in women with and without fibromyalgia (FM), while combined treatment with cognitive behavioral therapy and a tailored exercise program can improve outcome in FM, according to two studies published in the October issue of Arthritis Care & Research. Click Here to Visit the Store and find Much More…. Henriët van Middendorp, Ph.D., of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and colleagues conducted an experimental study of women with and without FM…
Fibromyalgia was once dismissed by many traditional medical practitioners as a phantom illness. But that view is changing rapidly. Not only is fibromyalgia accepted as a diagnosable illness, it is also a syndrome that researchers are finding more complicated as new information emerges. As recently as a year ago, many physicians still associated some of fibromyalgia’s symptoms with emotional problems, but that’s no longer the case. Click Here to Visit the Store and find Much…
Arthritic disease is the most common cause of disability in the United States and now affects 46 million Americans, or more than 21 percent of the adult population, a major new report finds. That number is expected to rise even higher as baby boomers age, so that by 2030, 40 percent of American adults will suffer from some form of arthritic disease, the researchers said. Click Here to Visit the Store and find Much More….…
Needling Away at Lower Back Pain New research shows that the Chinese treatment known as acupuncture may help control lower back pain without the added side effects of many pain control medications. An ancient Eastern science that has been steadily gaining popularity in the West, acupuncture uses the relatively painless placement of tiny needles into various nerve pathways on the body to help stimulate the production of natural pain relievers called endorphins. Click Here to…
More Clues To Fibromyalgia Pain Fibromyalgia patients have more “connectivity” between brain networks and regions of the brain involved in pain processing, which may help explain why sufferers feel pain even when there is no obvious cause, a new study suggests. Researchers had 18 women with fibromyalgia undergo six-minute fMRI brain scans, and compared their results to women without the condition. Participants were asked to rate the intensity of the pain they were feeling at…
Patients with fibromyalgia who are severely obese have more severe symptoms and lower quality of life (QOL), according to a study published in the February issue of Arthritis Care & Research. Chul-Hyun Kim, M.D., from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and associates measured body mass index (BMI) to determine its association with symptom severity and QOL in 888 patients in a treatment program for fibromyalgia. Participants completed the Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (FIQ) and the…
Researchers have detected abnormalities in the brains of people with fibromyalgia, a complex, chronic condition characterized by muscle pain and fatigue. “We showed in our study that the functional abnormalities observed were mainly related to disability,” and not to anxiety and depression status, said Dr. Eric Guedj, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Centre Hospitalier-Universitaire de la Timone in France. While some researchers have suggested that the pain reported by fibromyalgia patients was…