Fibromyalgia: Pain With No Cause

Fibromyalgia is an interesting, intriguing problem which I have personally experienced.  My case is actually quite unusual because I’ve read articles that said that around 90% of the people who have this are women.  I guess that makes me fairly unique as a man having personally experienced fibromyalgia.

It’s kind of interesting what medicine does with it and where they place it and it’s treatment. It is included medically as an arthritis, in the arthralgias.  In fact, the most common one, only after osteoarthritis.  Yet it doesn’t have anything to do with joints.   It’s related to muscles and tendons and pain.  

Fibromyalgia defined, is pain bilateral all over the body that lasts greater than 3 months.  Doctors have 18 specific sites that they test and you have to have 11 of those 18 to qualify officially for having fibromyalgia.   It’s characterized by aching, by pain in these spots, and by disturbed sleep patterns.  People rarely get good stage 4 sleep and that causes some other problems.

Fatigue is a major symptom.  Morning stiffness and depression are other symptoms, but not primary depression, only secondary depression.  You don’t have depression and then get this as a result of it. The depression comes because you’re in pain and there doesn’t appear to be any hope because there aren’t any good medicines, because it is going on for a long period of time, and because it actually changes neuro-transmitter levels of good feeling things in the brain; oxytocin and dopamine and different brain chemicals that help us to feel good.

Recurrent headaches are another of the symptoms.  It’s not migraines, you can actually get worse headaches than that, muscle tension headaches, usually of the occipital nerves in the back of the head.  

Also, you can get tender lymph nodes.  There can be bowel and bladder disturbances, and in fact irritable bowel syndrome is one of the things that characterize fibromyalgia.  Finally, some lesser symptoms include sensitivity to heat and cold, anxiousness, dizziness, occasional palpitations of the heart and even decreased coordination.  Sounds like that wrapped all of us up in there together.  I guess we’ve all got fibromyalgia.  

In my next post I'll talk a little about the history of fibromyalgia in the medical community and the possible causes of fibromyalgia.