Thursday, January 24, 2013

Fibromyalgia

I got up early today to see my doctor about the possibility of me having Fibromyalgia. I've actually wondered about it for the last couple of years but never really thought to look into it. Well, I did think to, but either I didn't have the money to go to the doctor, there was some other pressing medical issue, or the little annoying echo I sometimes hear in my head that is my Dad's voice said, "This is as good as it gets, suck it up and get on with your life". Generally, I've been able to do that until about a year or so ago when I hurt my back and when your back hurts all the time, having anything else hurt pretty much makes you more miserable than you can stand.

So like I said, I talked to my doctor, she poked at the trigger/pressure points, which, of course, hurt, and she prescribed me with a medicine to that will hopefully help.

Fibromyalgia is a disorder characterized by widespread musculoskeletal pain accompanied by fatigue, sleep, memory and mood issues. Researchers believe that fibromyalgia amplifies painful sensations by affecting the way your brain processes pain signals. Taken from the Mayoclinic website.

But I am not going to rely on only medicine to deal with this. I've taken various antibiotics, Ritalin (I had ADHD), migraine medicine, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, birth control (for medical issues), a brief time period of sleeping pills, various OTCs for pain, allergies and heartburn, and pain medication for chronic pain. Quite frankly I don't enjoy taking medicine and I am worried about my liver, so I have been looking at other means to help alleviate some of the symptoms of depression, anxiety, heartburn, and pain. A change in diet and exercise hasn't really helped that much although I have been more consistent with the change in diet than the exercise (kind of hard to get motivated to go swim or walk or get on an elliptical when you have trouble getting out of bed). I've even done a chronic pain study that focused on getting people to relax more, meditate, and you get the drift. I've never really been able to meditate and I don't deep breathe for long because for some reason I get light headed, I still try. I have managed to knock out most of my problems with heartburn, which is really cool!

Next up, even though I don't like taking medicine, I am going to look at some vitamins. I'm not too interested in giving up caffeine but I can cut down on my intake, not that it's that much anyway, and I don't know, I will see what I can find.     

1 comment:

  1. Are you still pursuing your disability case? If so, the fibromyalgia dx will work in your favor for that purpose.

    Be sure to research your vitamins carefully. Many vitamins contain ingredients imported from China and don't actually have any significant amounts of any value.

    Better quality vitamins are more expensive, but if the cheap ones don't work it's a waste of money.

    You may also want to do some research on candida yeast. It's one of commonest culprits in aggravating maladies like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. A certain amount of candida yeast occurs naturally in almost all people, but it's evolved to the point where they form yeast chains that latch onto the intestine walls which causes toxins to leak into your system, then you have systemic yeast which can seriously aggravate any kind of inflammation and even cause inflammatory maladies.

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