Bumped into this ProHealth article featuring a study which concludes fibromyalgia patients may be grouped by symptom and severity level. If so, the finding will help in making therapeutic decisions.
Here is the link. http://www.prohealth.com/library/showarticle.cfm?libid=18802
Tell us what you think.
Hi Ben,
It's an interesting concept, at least it is on paper. But the problem is, at least with me, that my pain can change hour to hour. It can be awful before I take Lyrica, for instance. Or I can suddenly have a pain crop up out of nowhere.
The second thing is, how do I quantify my pain? I think I've minimized the pain I feel, in an attempt to shut out the pain and make it easier for me to cope with it. I do this a lot. A lot. So I could say that my pain is medium, for instance, when it's actually high, but I've grown so used to minimizing how I feel that I don't know how to explain it any more. Maybe that's something that I alone suffer, but it would be a concern of mine.
Mostly, though, I worry about how the pain changes from hour to hour. I don't think this is a quantifiable illness, which is frustrating to a culture that is used to giving measured doses of a medicine in order to get a measured cure.
I am unsure that subclassification itself is helpful given the mercurial nature of our symptoms but I appreciate that the medical community is working on treatment approaches- collaboration serves to validate and escalate awareness of this terrible disorder and treatments for it.
Laurie
Hi Armando,
Thank you for always sharing the very latest info on Fibromyalgia. I hope that you and yours are well and happy.
As to the article at hand, I have mixed thoughts. I am certainly in agreement with Pet and Laurie's thoughts.
We receive many excellent publications from various Veterans groups, and of course with the catastrophic injuries sustained by the armed forces vets across the globe, there is always news on the latest concerns, and new approaches to chronic pain management.
I feel it is long overdue to classify different levels of this illness as there are so many differing factors involved, such as degenerative illnesses and injuries. I believe the very first concern should be the ability of the medical community to diagnose. It has been proven that if autoimmune arthritis can be diagnosed and treated within the first 2 years of onset, the results are excellent as far as the prevention of joint and organ damage, loss of function, and the ability for the patient to better manage pain. So why not fibromyalgia?
In reading through this article several times, I simply have to ask why they are going to all of the effort to classify us into different groups, if the actual treatment plan is virtually the same for all?
http://inthenews.mayoclinic.org/blogtag/american-academy-of-pain-me...
I am not against any form of therapy, physical, occupational, or cognative, however the recent aim of the medical community clearly points to replacing narcotic pain medication with therapy, or an invasive, and possibly dangerous pain management procedure. They are beginning to totally over ride the decision of the Physician and patient. This is my objection.