Why are you told there is no cure for fibromyalgia?
Why are you told there is no cure for fibromyalgia?
If you have fibromyalgia you have probably been through very extensive testing and the results of these tests are usually normal. Sometimes you wish, you're just hoping, that something would turn up as abnormal. Then at least you would have something you could put your finger on as a cause.
With fibromyalgia there are no tumors or other pathologies on X-rays, MRI's or CT-Scans, or ultrasound exams--these visual diagnostic tests can't "see" anything wrong. Laboratory/blood tests are done to check the function of various organs in your body and again these usually come back as normal. So, these blood tests tell you that you don't have any serious breakdown of your kidneys, liver, heart, thyroid, cancer, etc. These blood tests are good at finding diseased organs in your body but they don't show when they are mildly to moderately malfunctioning. The third category of tests that are done with fibromyalgia patients are "nerve" studies--what I call electrical function tests--these include electrical tests of your nerves (EMNG's), tests of your brain (EEG's) and tests of your heart (EKG's). And here again most fibromyalgia patients come out with flying colors.
Here's the basic problem--if all the tests come back as normal this means you don't have a problem so if you don't have a cause to your problems how can there be a cure? But what this really means is that these particular tests aren't able to detect when your body malfunctions in the particular ways that fibromyalgia patients' bodies start to malfunction. The good news is that there are functional metabolic tests that give insights into the areas of your body that aren't functioning at 100%. Simply talking to a patient and asking the right questions during an initial consultation can help me to determine how or why a person developed fibromyalgia and can also give me clear directions as to what must be done in treatment to restore their health.
You can have fibromyalgia symptoms when your body function is let's say at 65-85% of normal but the standard medical tests only detect when your body function has droped to 35%. Fibromyalgia is basically due to slight malfunctions in one or more areas/systems of your body but not severe enough to cause severe breakdowns and disease. That's partly why it's labeled as a syndrome, not a disease. Meanwhile, you don't care what you call it , you just want to get rid of the pain, fatigue, etc. The frustration ensues because the doctor tells you again and again that these test results are normal and you tell your doctor(s) again and again that you feel rotten. The doctor then says that it's all in your head and that you need to see someone in the psychological/psychiatric field. It's really the best the doctor can do because he/she doesn't "see" anything wrong with you. So, now the conclusion is made that fibromyalgia is incurable. Then the doctor's approach is to treat your symptoms with medication. And, as you may have experienced the medications may or may not work, they may work only for a short while, and often times the side effects of the medications bring on new problems. Meanwhile your body function is getting worse and everyone feels hopeless.
There is no one obvious cause, so the conclusion is made that if you can't find a cause how can there be a cure? And you're told to learn to live with it. I hope you can see that this really doesn't mean that your problems are incurable--this is so detrimental to patients because they lose hope, they tend to stop searching for a cure and this in itself is stressful.