Fibromyalgia Support
What you can do about chronic pain and fatigue
& Fibromyalgia Trigger Points
excerpted from "Fibromyalgia: A comprehensive Approach"
by Miryam Williamson
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see the interview with author Miryam Williamson

Sue:
Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. We will now move on to an excerpt from the book.

Chapter 1
What you can do about chronic pain and fatigue & Fibromyalgia Trigger Points
Excerpt reprinted by the permission of the author from: "Fibromyalgia: a comprehensive approach". ©2000 Miryam Williamson. All rights reserved See her website

If you're like most people with fibromyalgia, you ache all over and wish you could go to bed.  When you finally get there, once your legs have finished twitching, you settle into a hazy half-sleep in which your eyes stay closed but you can't stop thinking.  You wake up in the morning looking for the eighteen-wheeler that mistook your bed for the interstate.

Your energy level varies unpredictably from zero to two on a scale of ten. You lose your train of thought halfway through a sentence or- worse- throw in completely inappropriate word that leaves you flustered and your listener baffled.  Stupid things make you cry: a sentimental television commercial, a song you haven't heard since your freshman year.

You look healthy, in an overweight kind of way.  You pass medical lab tests with flying colors.  There's nothing wrong with you, doctors say.  Knowing that you want a solution, they scribble something on a pad of paper and send you off to the pharmacy to buy drugs that give minimal relief, if any.  Or they send you it's all in your head, and send you off in tears.

Fibromyalgia is most accurately classified as a syndrome,
rather than a disease.
A disease is a condition that has a known cause and can be identified by one or another set of laboratory tests.  So far, we do not know of a single cause of fibromyalgia, and there are no tests that can make the diagnosis.  There are, however, certain signs and symptoms that are characteristic of the disorder.  (Signs are findings in an examination; they provide objective evidence of a problem.  Symptoms are subjective and reported by the patient.  They may not be sufficient to convince a doctor that anything is wrong.)  A collection of signs and symptoms associated with a disorder is known as a syndrome.  Fibromyalgia usually comes with a baffling variety of symptoms, which is the main reason so many people who have it may go without a diagnosis for years.   Thus, fibromyalgia is often called the fibromyalgia  syndrome, usually abbreviated as FMS, or just FM.

Signs and Symptoms

Fibromyalgia is a form of muscular rheumatism characterized by tenderness, soreness, pain, and muscle spasms. Fibro- means fiber; my-means muscle; algia means pain.  Put them all together and they mean pain in the nonskeletal part of the musculoskeletal system- the muscles, tendons, and ligaments.  Doctors used to call it fibrositis, and some still do, but that mean inflammation of the fibrous tissues, an inaccurate description of the situation.

Most people with FM experience aches and pains in their muscles most of the time, but fibromyalgia is more than that.  The important thing to remember as you read the discussion of the signs and symptoms that follows is that no two people experience fibromyalgia in exactly the same way.  This makes it very difficult to diagnose, but there is one physical finding that is definitive.  People with fibromyalgia have a sore or painfully tender feeling in some or all of the eighteen places shown on the diagram in Figure 1-1.  The American College of Rheumatology (ACR) says that if   you hurt when at least eleven of these eighteen tender points are pressed, and you ache all over, then you have FM.

Unfortunately, few medical schools teach the tender point examination in physical diagnosis class, and none taught it before 1985, so only doctors who were graduated since then, or are interested in improving their diagnostic skills and have kept up with medical literature, know how to perform this exam.

Other symptoms
sometimes present with fibromyalgia:

• Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS)
• Numbness and tingling sensations
• Muscle twitching
• Water retention and swelling, especially of the hands, feet, and face
• Dry eyes and mouth
• Dizziness
• Skin sensitivity, itching and burning
• Impaired coordination
• Urinary urgency and/or burning
• Chest pain and pressure beneath the breast bone
• Intermittent hearing problems, and low-frequency hearing loss

see the interview with author Miryam Williamson

see more info on Fibromyalgia

What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Fibromyalgia: The Revolutionary Treatment That Can Reverse The Disease
Fibromyalgia: A comprehensive Approach
What is Fibromyalgia?
FREE Tender Point Chart

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