People usually find out they have fibromyalgia after a heck of a lot of testing yields no results. It’s still a diagnosis that gets backed into. Western medicine looks for specifics; if there’s pain, there must be a reason, and often, if we’ve had a traumatic accident, doctors look for something that could still be causing problems.
If you were expected to recover completely after an accident and haven’t, then I would say your pain might be fibromyalgia or some sort of myalgia type of syndrome. See a rheumatologist for a definitive diagnosis. Fibromyalgia is trauma-triggered pain, supposedly because of a genetic predisposition in a gene that allows inflammation and pain that gets activated by trauma.
I think the worst part of fibromyalgia is the fact that it’s fellow sufferers who help diagnose the condition rather than a doctor doing so--I was helped that way both for fibromyalgia as well as for my IBS and from what I hear anecdotally, I’m not alone. Yes, a doctor diagnosed me, but only after I went to him after years of fruitless testing and specfically said, “I think this is fibromyalgia, (and then, with another doctor, “I think this is IBS,” What do you think?”)
A lot of doctors think it’s all in our heads- I was certainly treated that way by my neurologists, and I’ve been to several. It wasn’t until I went to a rheumatologist that I got some satisfaction. It’s been speaking about my pain to other women that led to me happening to say the right thing to someone who had first one and then the other. Just think of how many people haven’t spoken up?
My interpretation of fibromyalgia and its cousins is that yes, you need to be genetically susceptible to develop these syndromes, but it’s how the brain processes trauma and life after trauma that locks in pain and that I believe can be reversed.
Alternative medicine is where I’ve found the most help. Alt med docs believe that fibromyalgia makes the body not accept thyroid into the cells, which leads to the common low thyroid symptoms found in fibromyalgia. My lack of energy and sensitivity to hot and cold has definitely gotten much better since I started taking Armour thyroid. Taking thyroid isn’t the whole answer, but it’s helped.
At first I needed 1 1/4 grains of thyroid a day. Over the years since I started it, I've needed less and less. At this point, I'm no longer taking it. The biggest difference? Yoga, plus getting John Barnes' MFR. I had lots of fascia throughout my thyroid. Since releasing it with MFR treatment, my thyroid has bounced back. I know of someone else who has had her kidney function improve dramatically. Look for someone near you at myofascialrelease.com.