Do you experience chronic pain? Do you feel like your pain is always being dismissed by others? If so, you may be suffering from fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is a physical condition with mental health components that can make living with chronic pain even more challenging. In this post, we’ll discuss what fibromyalgia is and how it can impact your life. We’ll also explore how fibromyalgia can be treated, both physically and mentally. If you’re struggling with both fibromyalgia and mental health issues, don’t worry – you’re not alone. There are ways to cope with both conditions and get relief from your symptoms. Stay tuned for more information!
Quite Confusing
When I was in training to be a doctor, one of the first things we were taught was how common fibromyalgia is. But this wasn’t just some made-up condition like they said. It’s an illness that affects many people globally.
Indeed, a lot of clinicians think fibromyalgia is just a mental health condition as opposed to a physical condition. There’s a lot of confusion about fibromyalgia. If you don’t know what it is, how are you going to do anything to treat it, right?
For some colleagues of mine, their experience taught them how a lot of individuals were somehow skeptical about this condition and just didn’t believe that it truly existed. That, or they used it as an umbrella diagnosis to cover things that they otherwise couldn’t figure out.
I see it as a very general diagnosis. I call it a “dump bucket diagnosis” because it includes many different issues and doesn’t tell us what treatment options are available or what we should do next.
With this, I have developed my understanding of fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia can be caused by different things. The way the body feels pain is that first, the tissue gets damaged. Then the tissue sends a signal to the brain. The brain can understand what those signals mean.
If it’s a common, normal, healthy signal, then it can be deemed as movement or touch – a normal sensation. But if it’s a signal that is out of sync with the rest of the nervous system and has a different signal pattern or it’s transferred via a track that is typically used for pain signals, then it can be perceived as pain.
Fibromyalgia can be one of any three of these issues or a combination thereof:
1. It can be tissue that gets injured.
This happens mostly to people who have weaker connective tissue. Their muscle fibers can break, scar, and develop an inefficient area. This then needs to break down to become realigned muscle fibers. If it does not, it forms a trigger point and becomes a source of pain.
2. The nerves themselves can have a lower or an excessively low threshold for signal transmission.
In some people, you can just feel their skin being overly sensitive, and whenever someone walks up behind them or sends a message to startle the other person. It seems like their nervous system is always ready for a fight-or-flight response no matter what’s happening around them at any given moment in time.
3. The third potential cause of fibromyalgia is the brain itself.
It is long believed that the potential cause of fibromyalgia is the brain itself. The signals that are coming from the different parts of the body are signals that the brain does not process appropriately. This is why people with fibromyalgia experience pain in various parts of their bodies. The pain can be constant or intermittent and can vary in intensity. It can also be accompanied by fatigue, sleep problems, headaches, and depression.
Oftentimes people with mood disorders, for instance, have a difficult time processing nerve signals because they just don’t have enough certain neurotransmitters. This causes signals that normally aren’t painful to be perceived as painful.
None of this is in your head. All of this has physiologic reasons for existing. How we go about treating it means figuring out which of these three patterns it is rooting from.
A lot of clinicians will continue to think along the lines of this being a mental concern. The reason is that there is such a common co-occurrence of mental health problems along with fibromyalgia in its presentation.
Picture this:
You are outside, sweating in the heat of the sun. Sweating is a physiologic response. It’s not just made up in our heads. There is a physiologic response that’s visible, and others can tell it too.
Similarly, fibromyalgia does not have to occur in a vacuum. It doesn’t have to be a mystery. There are ways to unravel it.
HEAL Methodology in Fibromyalgia
The first step is hearing the messages that your body is trying to convey with the perception of pain. The second step is envisioning what life is meant to be like.
These are the two first steps we need to do to figure out where somebody’s pain is coming from. We need to understand the mechanics of the body and how the brain processes information. Once we understand that, we can take a balanced approach to figure out where the pain is coming from.
Once these are done, then we can move on to our second and third stages: alleviation and leverage. Alleviation is when we try to reduce the pain. In some cases, we may never get rid of all the pain, but we can try to make it better, making it less of an impact on your life while we leverage repair mechanisms, as a final step to get you feeling better.
Conclusion paragraph: Fibromyalgia is a complicated condition that can be difficult to diagnose. While it has physical symptoms, the root cause of fibromyalgia may be in the brain itself. This means that standard pain management methods may not be effective for everyone with fibromyalgia. The HEAL methodology offers an individualized approach to managing pain and improving the quality of life for those living with fibromyalgia. If you or someone you know suffers from this condition, please call us today to schedule a discovery call. We would be happy to discuss this innovative treatment option with you and see if it is right for you.
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DISCLAIMER: The information in this email is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content is for general informational purposes only and does not replace a consultation with your own doctor/health professional
