Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain and fatigue condition that makes your hurt and feel tired 24/7, 365. It usually affects women more than men, and usually middle aged women more than those of younger age. The pain and fatigue vary from day to day in intensity and the pain also differentiates between different fibro suffers in where it occurs, how bad it is, etc. as well as the fatigue sometimes being less than the pain in some people, which the fatigue is sometimes worse. There is no cure for fibromyalgia, and no proven treatment for it either. Treatment varies from person to person, and what works for one may not work for all.
The best way to describe my fibro is like I have the flu all the time. I ache and have sharp, shooting, throbbing pains randomly throughout my body, though generally my arms and legs and shoulders ache more than any other part of my body.
Fibro also comes with a mixed bag of other illnesses, including depression, digestive issues, headaches, anxiety, and others. There is a common myth that depression causes fibro, but in my personal opinion and experience, even when your depression lets up and you have a good day, you STILL have pain and fatigue, so while being in pain and tired all the time may make you depressed, being depressed does NOT cause fibro to occur, though it can make the pain worse because you feel down.
Fibro is diagnosed by having pain 11 of 18 tender points that doctors will press on that are located all over the body, and having had wide-spread pain for at least 3 months. There are no blood tests or other types of test to diagnose fibro, so it’s mostly relying on the tender points and the discretion of the doctor to be diagnosed.
Sleep disorders and trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or just sleep problems in general accompany fibromyalgia. You never feel well-rested, no matter how much you sleep, and that’s the fatigue and exhaustion part of the condition.
Stress and emotional and physical distress may trigger the condition, but there is no known cause for why some people develop it and some don’t and there is no known prevention for it either.
So those are just some basics and I’ll be discussing treatment options that I myself have tried or am trying at the time, and other research done on it and it’s affect and treatments and so on.
Looks like a good blog and I'm anxious to hear about the treatments you've tried and are trying now. What has helped you and what did not.
ReplyDeleteI read somewhere that docs now think more younger people have it, they just aren't diagnosed, either because docs don't want to diagnose it so young (or don't know what it is!) or because younger people won't go to the doctor and will shrug it off. Or that a lot of people with a slow build up (like I had) just fall through the cracks. (this is Charlotte, by the way :p)
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