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Daniel Clauw: Dolores is a fairly typical case of fibromyalgia and that she experiences pain throughout her entire body and use this as being if you will an invisible disease because there are really no outward signs that someone would had a fibromyalgia.
Fibromyalgia is invisible to the outward observer because it is not due to any damage or inflammation of the tissue. That is due to a problem in the way the brain and the central nervous system are processing painful information and at best the person feels pain even in spite of the fact that there’s no damage in these areas of the body where they are having the pain.
Fibromyalgia is a condition that affects about two and a half to 3% of the population in the United States and causes pain throughout the entire body, difficulty with fatigue, memory problems, sleep problems and a whole variety of other symptoms.
Dolores said that she had had these symptoms for quite some time before she eventually was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and that’s not at all atypical. The estimate is that most people see seven doctors and it takes six to seven years after the onset of symptoms before they’re finally diagnosed with fibromyalgia. That’s getting a lot better as more and more physicians recognize fibromyalgia and in the near future there will be drugs specifically approved for fibromyalgia but at present there is a quite a delay in many people between when they have symptoms and when they are ultimately diagnosed by fibromyalgia.
Dolores described the number of different things that she does to help treat her fibromyalgia. One of which was permanent is exercise and that’s been shown consistently to be a very effective treatment for individuals with fibromyalgia. The problem with exercise is that fibromyalgia patients have to very gradually increase their exercise or else the exercise can actually make them worse.
Dolores also mentions the fact that she has sleep difficulties and she has done a number of different things that helped her sleep better and we know that if people sleep better that that will leave to some reduction in the pain and some of the other symptoms of fibromyalgia. In addition to the types of things that Dolores talked about which are really self-management strategies for fibromyalgia. There are many drugs that we know work in many individuals with fibromyalgia and there are at least four or five different classes of drugs now that we use in the setting of fibromyalgia.
Fibromyalgia like most illnesses that adults develop is a chronic medical illness and so it’s very unusual for fibromyalgia to just go away or to spontaneously resolve about the same token and the overwhelming majority of fibromyalgia patients can be appropriately managed using combinations of drug therapies and non-drug therapies.
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