Fibromyalgia

         

        Pain has no memory and no mercy. Is it like a bad flu or a severe headache? How can you find the words to describe it?
       Millions with severe fatigue, muscular pain, poor sleep patterns, and the other symptoms characteristic of fibromyalgia would understand you in a blink of an eye.
       Picture your body as being a series of electrical circuits. Suppose that you have the bad luck to make damage to certain part of your body repeatedly. What happens? As part of a chronic pain response, a wire goes from the shoulder to your spine, and a second wire then travels up the spinal cord to your brain. The brain receives a signal that says, “I hurt my shoulder; let me do something about it.” The brain then makes a chemical or chemicals that suppress the pain. It wires a signal back down the spinal column, and a second wire returns to the shoulder. The chemical is released, and the pain gets better or goes away.
       What happens in fibromyalgia? Your body is like cross circuited machine.  The body gets flooded with “input” circuits giving it information. The spinal is having problems to sort out and filter these signals. Larger circuits close off smaller ones. With time, the electrical circuits will be very excitable. Normally non-painful stimuli are regarded as painful ones. The “output” wires fail to alleviate discomfort. The circuits discharge signals that increase your perception of pain, not only in the region that was hurt but also in the area around it. As a result, the processes that regulate your body become confused and you start to develop all sorts of troublesome symptoms. You can’t get a good night’s sleep, your muscles go into spasm, and you become fatigued. This aggravates you further and creates a vicious cycle that makes the pain even worse. In a nutshell, this series of events is observed in fibromyalgia.
       Description of a set of symptoms and signs culminated in the recognition of a syndrome characterized by musculoskeletal complaints combined with fatigue, poor sleep, pain amplification, and other no musculoskeletal symptoms. The concept of fibromyalgia has clearly come a long way, but there are many miles to travel.  
       Fibromyalgia is disruptive to the lives of everyone it touches, yet little information is widely available to help stabilize and protect people. Adaptation to Fibromyalgia means to make a series of life adjustments to achieve quality of living. 
       Although much has been learned over the past decade about fibromyalgia and myofascial pain syndromes, much remains to be discovered about its causes, nosology, treatment, and overlap with a variety of rheumatic and no rheumatic conditions. Advances in rheumatology, cardiovascular medicine, endocrinology, epidemiology, immunology, infectious disease, neurology, psychiatry, and psychology have served as the basis for the formulation of new lines of research and novel therapeutic interventions.