Take Me to Editor's "Mind Body & Spirit" Natural Products & Resource Box for Fibromyalgia

Are you suffering from fibromyalgia?

Do you know the symptoms or where the so-called “trigger points” are located?

What is the treatment for this syndrome? Is there a cure?

And, if you’re like me, and are always searching for a holistic approach to the treatment of any disease, perhaps you also want to know if there is a natural cure or remedy for the chronic pain that characterizes this condition.

In reviewing some of the medical literature on fibromyalgia, I came across this statement at WebMD:

 “Fibromyalgia is a syndrome of chronic pain not a disease or a psychological disorder.”

I encourage you to keep this statement in mind as you read my story and my take on the illness. 

A New Ailment 

It was a Saturday afternoon after a particularly stressful week at the office. I had been unable to sleep the night before. My eyes were open all night long: sometimes staring up at the ceiling, sometimes in a daze like stare. For sure, this sleeplessness thing did not become me.

About 30 hours later into my bout with sleep deprivation, a funny thing happened. I started to get pain in several parts of my body. First my arm, then my leg, then the upper back. There was generalized weakness and fatigue.

What  Kind of Pain is This?

What a new sensation, this excruciating pain that just sort of moved around to different parts of my body, and all in such a short period of time. Wow, I really need to get some sleep, I thought. This can’t be real.

On Monday, I called in sick and scheduled an appointment with my primary care physician (PCP) who happened to be an internist. 

As I described what had happened over the weekend, I told her I had concluded that whatever had caused such acute pain which moved around at will to different areas of my body had to have a psychosomatic origin.

You see, in my mind, the pain in my upper back and neck region was explainable because 19 years ago I had been in an MVA (car accident) and had subsequently developed OA (osteo-arthritis) in the cervical (neck) region. And to address the problem, I had used chiropractic adjustments periodically throughout the years to help when the pain became a bit much.

(Ok, starting now I will stop using the slang while telling this story. Having worked as a disability examiner (DE) for the Social Security Administration for the past three years has got me talking medical gibberish :)-

Psychosomatic? When the Things I Had Been Telling Myself Became Real

But the rest of the pains, I told my doctor, I was sure--that even though they seemed as real as a black cat crossing in front of your car just after an argument with a known friend—I told her I was sure these pains had been manifested by my mind. 

“So after the pain started moving around for the second and third time,” I said to the doctor, “I started just to laugh at it. I started to talk to myself and tell myself that it was a good trick that my mind was playing, but that I was not amused.”

(By the way, I had picked up this “I am not amused” saying from an African friend of mine, who, whenever he would get really upset, would say in his heavy Zimbabwean accent, “I am not amused!”)

Every time the pain would try to resurface, I laughed and told myself that my subconscious had really misunderstood my cues and instructions.

You see, my job had become so stressful over the past few months that I kept telling myself that I really needed to resign my position because it was starting to affect my health negatively.

Undoubtedly, my mind had started to internalize the suggestion that my health was being adversely affected, and had created the conditions in my body to make these suggestions real. Yeah, it's true. Thoughts are things.