Thank you in advance for your answers.
My daughter’s doctors certainly think so.
Yes. A dear friend of ours has suffered horribly from it for several years. It appears to be slowly killing her. She is a loving, charitable, down-to-earth no-nonsense person in her early 50’s.
I have no doubt that the people who suffer from it think it is real, but like just like the OP, I find it odd that all the people who have it seem to be mentally unbalanced in other ways. My wife works in healthcare and there is definitely a type of patient she sees that she can spot as having fibromyalgia without looking at their medical record. I have never seen a patient who gets it as a result of physical trauma, though I understand that can cause it. Every person I have ever seen have it is a woman, who is depressed/anxious/schizophrenic, and is typically morbidly obese with a sleep disorder of some kind. They also never seem to be in a relationship and have usually done things to make themselves less desirable to a mate, such as being obsessed with Wicca, beanie babies, cats, etc.
And before I get attacked as being a jerk, let me point out that these are the people I have seen with it over many years. YMMV and your supermodel and otherwise mentally normal girlfriend who has it may be an outlier.
Yes. I suffered from it as an added bonus to my rheumatoid arthritis symptoms.
Real, as in “the people diagnosed with it have an illness, with symptoms and pain?” Absolutely.
Real, as in “these people are suffering from a specific disease in common?” The medical community is much less convinced. The evidence seems to point to the symptoms being too diverse to be a single illness or small set. That said, you’ll find legitimate experts on both sides.
“They don’t know for sure” seems to be the general answer, but according my doctor friends, if you have to put money on it, bet on it not being “real” in this sense, but rather a “fallback disgnosis” when you’re not sure what’s wrong.
Your opinion is likely influenced by the fact that most “conditions” that are primarily nerve-related are heavily influenced by the brain. It’s not just the nerves that are at fault, it’s how their signals are interpreted by the brain.
So if the brain is under abnormal stresses, or already out of whack (by mental illness) it’s more likely that they’ll have some type of nerve problem as well.
Think of it like this - if your car has a check engine light on, you take it to the mechanic. If he determines that the sensor throwing the light is working properly, and the wiring between the sensor and the computer is fine, then he just resets the computer, and all is well. Problem is, you can’t just reset someone’s brain. So what should be a normal sensation on someone’s skin, or in their muscles, might be interpreted as intense pain.
Then there’s people who truly do have physical nerve damage (or under/over development), or undiagnosed skin maladies, both of which would fall under the umbrella of symptoms labelled as fibromyalgia. It’s the catch-all du jour for some doctors, and for lots of self-diagnosing WebMD surfing stay-at-home moms.
So yeah, it’s real. But it’s poorly diagnosed, and even less understood.
Are you sure it isn’t the other way around? Long term pain can cause depression, anxiety, weight loss or gain. Chronic pain is debilitating. Actually, all of the fibromyalgia patients I’ve seen are painfully thin and rather stoic.
According to a fair percentage of plaintiff attorneys I deal with, the most common cause is being involved in a low-speed rear-end motor vehicle collision.
Having a chronic illness makes people depressed, BTW. I do know what kind of people you’re talking about - the ones who don’t want to do anything about it because they like having people feel sorry for them.
I have a Facebook friend (lady I grew up with) whose “fibromyalgia” dramatically reduced in severity when she was diagnosed with celiac sprue and went on a gluten-free diet, and I also believe that some of the people who think they have this actually have rhabdomyolysis (muscle destruction) from certain drugs, most commonly Evista and statin anti-cholesterol meds.
According to a fair percentage of plaintiff attorneys I deal with, the most common cause is being involved in a low-speed rear-end motor vehicle collision.
But seriously, picunurse, the research I’ve done on depression (which is nowhere near academic quality) suggests depression significantly magnifies discomfort arising from soft-tissue injuries and becomes part of a feedback loop in which the patient never seems to feel better, and their depression deepens which further magnifies the symptoms. What’s really going on? Who knows. Maybe the symptoms are legit and stem from a brain that incorrectly processes or even creates tactile signals, maybe some people just need the attention and personal touch they get from massage & chripractors.
Google conversion disorder for some light reading on a related note.
picunurse - I knew as soon as a threw out a type for someone with the condition, it would be met with “but I’ve seen the opposite” type responses, as is the standard practice on a message board.
I’m not a healthcare professional, and I won’t pretend to know what the entire patient population is for this condition, nor do I know the chicken and egg answer to which came first. I will say that people who are depressed/anxious/schizophrenic that I have met are generally a medical train wreck and rarely have just that problem. In fact, while I wouldn’t say they are necessarily hypochondriacs, they do seem to seek out additional diagnoses like mental illness merit badges to explain every little thing that is wrong with them. Most of the ones I know also ultimately go off their meds because they don’t like the side effects, which may bring on some of the other issues. That said, these are only my opinions/observations. As I said, YMMV.
And this is why anecdotes are useless in real clinical analysis. Everybody generalizes from their small subset to the population at large.
My family doctor sure thinks so. My wife went to see him with some vague complaint. He said it might just be fibromyalgia. He didn’t think so, but there was a simple test. He prescribed something–I think it was prednisone. He said that if it really were fibromyalgia, the symptoms would disappear overnight. They didn’t, she stopped taking the drug and the symptom gradually dissipated.
From this I drew the following conclusions. He thinks it is a real disease with a real treatment. My wife’s symptoms, while undiagnosed, were caused by some real disease, presumably some kind of infection that she fought off. And she isn’t nuts.
As you can see from my user name, I am a healthcare professional.
I agree with you, that some individuals with various mental illnesses do seek out other diagnoses to explain their mental issues. Schizophrenia is a perfect example. A few years ago there seemed to be a break-through in the care of schizophrenic patients. It appeared that dialysis improved them. What was actually happening was dialysis was feeding their underlying delusions, making it easier for them to function in society.
I’m sure Fibromyalgia is over-diagnosed, but that doesn’t make it imaginary. It isn’t something that can or should be diagnosed by anyone not a neurologist, specializing in it. It is likely a rare condition. But, it’s an easy “wastebasket” diagnosis in many cases.
I recall reading that unlike other physical conditions, there is no objective diagnostic test for fibromyalgia, which suggests that it is a mental condition.
It is interesting to me that tinnitus is considered to be a symptom of fibromyalgia. The thing is, pretty much everyone has at least mild tinnitus. i.e. if you listen carefully enough in a quiet enough place, you can hear noises which do not correspond to any real world source.
So that if you have mild tinnitus, it’s easy to get caught up in a loop where you obsess over it, which makes you listen for it and when you hear it it only feeds your obsession.
So as Sun Jester suggests, perhaps people with fibromyalgia are in large part caught in a loop in which they obsess over the minor aches and pains which are actually quite common.
I know severa people who are convinced they have it and they all fit into a very specific profile suggesting mental illness or depression is at the root. My belief is that we supply ourselves with healthy doses of pain killers, possibly some people in a depressed state are not producing adequate amounts of these natural pain killers and seem to have a low threshold for pain. M.S. is another one I have my doubts about.
Are you serious? Multiple sclerosis, unlike fibromyalgia, can and does show up on MRIs and in various tests of muscular and nerve function. There is NO doubt that it is a real, debilitating condition.
Are you serious about MS? It’s an absolutely debilitating and progressive disease. What could you seriously doubt about it? I’ve watched family and friends become more no aired over the years- incotinant, lose balance, lose mobility. Just terrible.