So I know the obvious, if you are overly active it will be a lot more painful for you. But if I were to ignore the pain and push myself would it physically damage my body? That's what I don't understand about all this, what exactly could and or would happen if you did things active people did? My doctor wants me to exercise, he hasn't really spoken about the limits so I figured I would probably get a lot more information here.
Overdoing will increase your pain terribly. Not sure about permanent damage. But I can see it happening, your in pain, you don't sleep, makes you clumsy and careless ie-permanent damage. Makes sense, Charlie :)
From the research that I have read, there should be no permanent physical damage to your muscles our joints just from the fibro, however you will feel horrible. Also, you could get injured if you had some type of spam of a muscle or buckling of a joint while being over active.
Holly, although the official answer is "no," I think that fibro is so little understood that doctors truly don't know exactly how it affects our bodies. I know that pushing through the pain made my fibro much worse, to the point where i could no longer do the work I was doing. And it makes me horribly fatigued, which is scary when you have to drive home from work.
Yours is a very, very good question. I truly think doctors should investigate it thoroughly, to find an answer for it. For instance, many people with fibro also have auto-immune illnesses that haven't yet manifested themselves (fibro and autoimmune illnesses seem to go hand in hand,) so pushing through the pain in that instance could be doing more harm than good, via the autoimmune illnesses.