Monday, September 26, 2011

What is Fibromyalgia?

I guess if I'm going to write a blog about Fibromyalgia then I should introduce it first. Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition affecting approximately 5 million Americans. Woman between the ages of 25 and 60 are at the highest risk of developing fibromyalgia. While the symptoms vary from person to person, the most common ones are: muscle pain throughout the body, fatigue,sleep problems,anxiety or depression and headaches. I personally suffer from the widespread muscle pain,fatigue,sleep problems and both depression and anxiety. I frequently have headaches and am often unable to even just stay awake. Since there is such a wide variety of symptoms it's often hard for doctors to diagnose fibromyalgia. There is no one certain test that will prove for sure if you have it or not. The way that I was diagnosed was my doctor ran several blood tests, sent me to have tests done to rule out problems with my nerves, and tried to rule out other problems it could be. After about 6months of regular monthly check-ups she came to the conclusion that I had fibromyalgia. There are questions to ask your doctor if you think that you have fibromyalgia and for a list of them visit the webmd website. I hope to discuss common treatment options in my next blog.

1 comment:

  1. I would have to say that this post is very informative; you bring up the statistics on how common of a problem it is and you talk about the most common symptoms. Since it is so hard to diagnose there are a lot of nay sayers on this disorder. Unfortunately some doctors abused this diagnosis when it first came about. If they were unable to diagnose the problem someone had they would just say it was fibromyalgia. This abuse of the term gave the disorder a bad name, it is a shame that it happened. I hope that your blog brings to light the truth of this disorder.

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