> IME, many doctors, and even some consultants, use fibromyalgia as a catch-all where there is chronic pain and fatigue, but they can't find the underlying cause - basically a big umbrella to cover what are likely a broad spectrum of diseases and health issues.
That is very much not myself. I meet all the diagnostic criteria, and regularly experience somewhere around a hundred of the two hundred known symptoms. There is not another illness that matches my symptoms as well as fibromyalgia. I am a case study in what FM looks like at its very worst (literally, I've been featured in several journals as a case study).
I went through a variety of nerve studies before the diagnosis was made, and they're functioning perfectly. Including multiple biopsies. Getting the FM diagnosis is not easy where I live, most specialists would rather send you away with no diagnosis than that one. I met the criteria for FM on day one, and went through a decade of being tested for absolutely everything else.
The propensity for overdiagnosis, in some nations, of FM, causes me no end of pain whenever I raise the illness. There is always someone who feels the need to tell me that they believe it doesn't exist, or think that I must have something else that has gone undiagnosed, or think that they can suddenly cure it. That's exactly why I don't talk about it in detail. People think that they're helping, especially if they're empathetic. But all it does is undercut the last fifteen years. It makes the suffering more... Lonely. I can appreciate the sentiment, but I've never been able to appreciate the gesture.
I do expect that somewhere in the future FM will be split into several different types, and even illnesses. The illness is extremely "young", it got its name in 1993 (30-40 years younger than MS). Most of the illness is a total unknown at this point in time. There's no real global agreement as to what kind of illness FM is. It gets called autoimmune, neurological, rheumatoid, etc. depending on where you live. The evidence is currently leaning towards neurological, as FM has markers in the white matter of the brain that are unique to those who suffer from it. But we'll probably need another decade or two to be certain about that.
That is very much not myself. I meet all the diagnostic criteria, and regularly experience somewhere around a hundred of the two hundred known symptoms. There is not another illness that matches my symptoms as well as fibromyalgia. I am a case study in what FM looks like at its very worst (literally, I've been featured in several journals as a case study).
I went through a variety of nerve studies before the diagnosis was made, and they're functioning perfectly. Including multiple biopsies. Getting the FM diagnosis is not easy where I live, most specialists would rather send you away with no diagnosis than that one. I met the criteria for FM on day one, and went through a decade of being tested for absolutely everything else.
The propensity for overdiagnosis, in some nations, of FM, causes me no end of pain whenever I raise the illness. There is always someone who feels the need to tell me that they believe it doesn't exist, or think that I must have something else that has gone undiagnosed, or think that they can suddenly cure it. That's exactly why I don't talk about it in detail. People think that they're helping, especially if they're empathetic. But all it does is undercut the last fifteen years. It makes the suffering more... Lonely. I can appreciate the sentiment, but I've never been able to appreciate the gesture.
I do expect that somewhere in the future FM will be split into several different types, and even illnesses. The illness is extremely "young", it got its name in 1993 (30-40 years younger than MS). Most of the illness is a total unknown at this point in time. There's no real global agreement as to what kind of illness FM is. It gets called autoimmune, neurological, rheumatoid, etc. depending on where you live. The evidence is currently leaning towards neurological, as FM has markers in the white matter of the brain that are unique to those who suffer from it. But we'll probably need another decade or two to be certain about that.