Fibromyalgia

Excerpts from the entry on Fibromyalgia in Relieving Pain Naturally by Dr. Sylvia Goldfarb and Roberta W. Waddell. For full entries on all 37 conditions and 27 treatments, order the book.

Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain disease of unknown origin. When people with this disorder seek help, they are often shunted from one specialist after another, only to be eventually informed it is all in their heads or they are suffering from depression. Although dismissively told that psychological distress is the cause of their pain, fibromyalgia is not a psychiatric illness. The opposite is, in fact, most probably the case—that their distressed psychological state is the result of attempting, unsuccessfully, to cope with the pain, not the cause of it. Prior to 1990, fibromyalgia was not even recognized by mainstream medicine as a medical musculoskeletal disorder. Even now, the person has had the condition for about five years on average before being accurately diagnosed with it, and has often undergone extensive testing and unnecessary surgery. It is a progressive illness that, in its early stages, appears for only a few days at a time, and, as with many conditions involving pain, it is usually worse in the morning, easing up somewhat in the early afternoon. It is estimated that up to 10 million people in the United States have the disease, which is known to strike four times as many women as men, usually those between the ages of twenty and forty-five.

Also in this entry:

• Symptoms
• Causes
• Diagnosing the Problem
• Conventional Treatments
• Problems with Some Conventional Treatments
• Effective Conventional Treatment for Fibromyalgia
• Self-Help Alternative Treatments
• Assisted Alternative Treatments

See below for full list of all conditions and treatments in the book. Or, download a complete Condition entry or Treatment entry for free.