Here’s some good news about an alternative fibromyalgia treatment system. The purpose of this article is to empower you to take charge of your own health, and choose the right type of fibromyalgia doctor. There may be some things in this article that make you feel uncomfortable, but a short bout of discomfort is much better than suffering, so here we go.
Too many people have been broken by the “fibromyalgia” diagnosis and the usual, miserable treatment. It makes me hate the word. Maybe you hate it too. “Fibromyalgia,” is just a label for naming a group of symptoms that mostly describe muscle pain. The symptoms include widespread, pinpoint pain all over the body, with bouts of “fibro fog,” or brain fog (foggy thinking), chronic fatigue (fm/cfs/cfids), headaches and extreme sensitivity to moderate or mild touch pressure. Fibromyalgia doctors, and fibromyalgia specialists say there is “no known cause” of fibromyalgia.
Alternative Fibromyalgia Treatment: Beyond Pain Management
Important: The term “fibromyalgia” does NOT define a definite process of disease—it just NAMES a group of symptoms for the doctor’s convenience. There is no pathologist who diagnoses it from looking at a biopsy of the muscle tissue. This is an important point. This diagnosis does NOT identify any mechanism of why you have this group of symptoms, or any causes of fibromyalgia. The fibromyalgia label itself doesn’t really help you.
The doctors that treat this syndrome and give such a diagnosis do not offer any deep insight into the underlying reasons for the presence of the symptoms. The fibromyalgia specialist has the same limitations. When you seek another doctor’s opinion, and you say “I have fibromyalgia,” it only suggests that you have a lot of pain symptoms, and someone else decided to label your condition that way. As a symptom label, it does not describe a disease, nor is it the root cause of anything.
Since most fibromyalgia doctors, have no idea what causes fibromyalgia, the treatment focuses on lessening the symptoms. Acute-care (crisis-care) drug treatments are the choice; like pain killers, muscle relaxants, anti-inflammatory drugs, and cortisone shots. Warning: those drug treatments are for acute care; they give short-term relief from pain. Those treatments don’t help your brain-fog/ mental-fog/ fibro-fog, or cfs/chronic fatigue. They never improve the core reasons you have your symptoms in the first place. Unfortunately, symptom-based drug management care is usually presented to you as your only choice.
Fact: drug management will not change the underlying process that causes the pain, at all. Ignoring and not investigating the underlying cofactors will eventually lead to frustration, and poor health.
Fibromyalgia is a result of many things. Grouping your symptoms under one label and treating it like a disease is a disservice to you.
Functional Medicine for Fibromyalgia
A select few integrative doctors using a functional medicine system can uncover the contributing cofactors of your underlying condition. Do you really want to take drug treatments for the rest of your life, and suffer their side effects too? Your alternative is an integrative alternative doctor. You can go beyond your fibromyalgia pain management, and address your long-term health; from the ground, up with natural remedies.
Fibromyalgia does not describe a process of disease, nor is it the underlying cause of anything, but it is a result of many things.
The reasons why your condition came about in the first place still needs attention! If you were to stop taking the pain killers, wouldn’t the pain come right back? You know it would. That’s because the underlying causes of your condition have not changed, only your perception of your condition has changed.
Long term use of chemical treatments can eventually lead to other, seemingly non-related symptoms. That, in turn, can also be “controlled” with additional drugs—an undesirable cascade of events.
Natural Remedies for Fibromyalgia
We can use natural remedies for fibromyalgia in tandem with temporarily killing pain (which might be necessary for now). You wouldn’t stop any prescription treatments until they are no longer needed. When you go to an integrative chiropractor he will be knowledgable in alternative medicine and functional medicine. Therefore, he will be able to investigate the potential underlying causes of your condition. He will be looking at this pain syndrome with different lenses. Let your new integrative chiropractor look for the underlying conditions that may be present.
Contributing Factors to Fibromyalgia
My experience shows that there are so many possibilities for contributing factors, including: autoimmunity, functional impairments of the spine at one or several levels, the hidden injury of mild head trauma (concussion syndrome) in your past, true vitamin B1 deficiency (worsened by taking synthetic vitamins and needing a naturally sourced B complex supplement).
What you want is an individual treatment plan. You will save years of chronic pain, frustration and suffering when you allow yourself to seek the help of the right alternative fibromyalgia specialist, and choose the alternative now, rather than later.