Fibromyalgia

Another Name For Impaired Health 

Paul A. Goldberg, MPH,DC,DACBN

Increasing numbers of patients are labeled each year with a "diagnosis" that leaves them frustrated and confused with no answers to their discomforts. Where con these patients turn to find answers to their persistent poor health? A Physician, Public Health Professional, Clinical Epidemiologist and Clinical Nutritionist gives advice on where to start.

Medical Diagnosis is at best a tenuous proposition. Extraordinary lengths are often gone to in order to arrive at a name that does nothing more than describe the symptoms the patient is experiencing while telling us nothing about why the patient is diseased. Logically, if we do not know what causes a problem it is difficult to know what to do to correct it.

One relatively new medical diagnosis, notorious for the naming of a patient's symptoms while ignoring the cause(s) of their problems, is that of "Fibromyalgia:

Pain and stiffness of the muscle fibers has likely plagued humankind for thousands of years. In the early 1800's doctors began to cail this discomfort "muscular rheumatism." Later the term "fibrositis' was added to denote the inflammatory type pains that were present in localized spots in patients suffering with muscular rheumatism. During the late 1980s the term "Fibromyalgia' began to be increasingiy used and became prevalent in the medical literature during the 1990s.

The diagnosis "Fibromyalgia' has continued to grow in popularity as growing legions of patients complain of the muscular discomforts, fatigue, problems in sleeping and a host of other complaints not traceable through physical examination or standard laboratory testing to any specific diagnostic entity.