Fibromyalgia

[Flatulating Bovine]

Real or fake? Discuss.

[Flatulating Bovine]

I'll go first.

I did personal injury defense for about five years, and have worked on plaintiff personal injury cases before then and since then. In all of them where "fibromyalgia" was raised, the person was, shall we say, unusual. Not just a little different, marching to their own drummer unusual, but had this sort of aura or essence of craziness about them.

I remember one deposition that we had to stop because my client (which I then dropped) was unable to coherently answer a question, and she was a big fibro kook. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that her whole story may have been fabricated and dropped it for ethical reasons. But I've seen many cases go all the way with someone claiming this stuff.

I have a doctor friend, a foot doctor, and he asserts that there IS an actual medical condition called fibromyalgia but the term is overused and has become the go-to diagnosis for someone whose symptoms involve pain and not being able to go to work, yet there is no detectable medical cause for it. I just find this really hard to believe.

I even have a friend who claims he has been diagnosed with it. Supposedly it makes him disabled. But he manages to work and even manages to engage in fairly significant exercise (walking a mile up and down hills) if it means he will get to do something he likes, like drink beer at a bar. Yes, he is 51 and claims low back pain - but who doesn't...the way he describes the condition leaves me scratching my head - typical fibro patient vagaries and hyperbole - saying things like "I feel like I've been hit by a bus and then it gets worse from there." What?

Maybe I'm being a skeptical a-h but I just don't think this stuff exists or would exist were it not for med-legal secondary gain type scenarios.

[Burnaby49]

According to Wikipedia Fibromyalgia has been recognized as a diagnosable disorder by the US National Institutes of Health and the American College of Rheumatology. That doesn't mean it isn't being used as a scam by nutjobs (think whiplash from fender-benders).


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibromyalgia

[JamesVincent]

Fibromyalgia is, like was said, one of those things that is a real condition but has been overused to describe almost anything. I suffer from another similar (and diagnosed) condition called Trigeminal Neuaralgia, which was originally diagnosed as fibromyalgia. The whole issue is when someone suffers from a nerve type (or complains of a nerve type pain) the whole idea now is to label them with fibro and treat them as such. When I was diagnosed with TGN I went to the hospital with screaming pain emanating from my right temple. I felt like every pore and hair was on fire and every tooth was impacted. The hospital originally diagnose me with fibro. It took another hospital visit and a trip to the neurologist to get me diagnosed correctly and treated correctly. It seems like doctors just kinda lump in any unexplained pain that seems like it was nerve based in the fibro category and thats that. And since they have consolidated a lot of other symptoms into the fibro diagnosis (including chronic fatigue) it can be used to describe a whole mess of different disorders.

Fibro is also the basis for a ton of MLM products. If you peruse the MLM forums and look up some of the powders and shakes for sale you'll find a good deal of them advertise that they help relive fibro, including the product that brought me to this forum, Natru-burst from One-24. And since fibro seems to be able to be triggered psychosomitac people buying the product will feel better since they were told it will help their symptoms. So, yes, it is a very real and disabling condition. No, most people who "suffer" from it do not have it, they have either something else going on or are indeed faking it to be "sick". Yes, people can be disabled by it.