- Fibromyalgia Pain
Fibromyalgia: Why Is It All In Your Head?
Until very recently, many doctors refused to believe fibromyalgia pain was real. However, in the last few years technology has proven to be very useful, allowing researchers the ability to see inside a fibromyalgia sufferers head using powerful MRI brain scans, and what they are finding is that the answers to treating fibromyalgia may just be that “ All In Your Head”.
A current main theory to why you or someone you know may be suffering from fibromyalgia is all about what’s going on inside your head. Don’t worry this is not psychological, you’re not going crazy…studies show that its chemical changes taking place.
Individuals who have developed fibromyalgia appear to have an oversensitivity to pain signals in their brain. This is type of reaction to pain is called ‘central sensitization’. Researchers are not quite sure why this occurs in some individuals, but they believe that it may be caused by various minor changes in brain chemicals. The hows and why of what triggers these brain changes and the causes are still not known.
Central Sensitization
Central sensitization usually involves debilitating fatigue in the majority of patients along with most individuals experiencing wide spread chronic pain. Many researchers are targeting central sensitization as the cause for the majority of musculoskeletal pain seen in fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome patients.
Many patients cannot tolerate:
- Jewelry lying against skin
- The pressure of sheets while sleeping
- A Hand Shake
- A light Caress
Fibromyalgia Pain Perception
Using MRI scans Dr. Daniel Clauw, a rheumatologist and professor of medicine at the University of Michigan, was the first to provide objective proof that fibromyalgia pain is real. In a study he published that involved 16 sufferers and 16 unaffiliated volunteers; he demonstrated that when small amounts of pressure was applied to the study participants left thumbs, the fibromyalgia patients had blood rushed to areas of the brain that are linked to pain perception. The healthy volunteers were immune to the lighter pressure; as a result Dr. Clauw had to increase the pressure by doubling it to elicit the same pain response that he saw in the afflicted fibromyalgia group.
Fibromyalgia in the study showed that they did indeed have elevated or heightened sensitivity to touch, and Dr. Clauw believes that fibromyalgia sufferers have sensory messages to the brain that are exaggerated, making even the feel of a light weight sheet on the body painful. This is due to the fact that countervailing messages from the brain are too weak to shut off the pain response, so the combined effect is to “turn up the volume on pain”. Researchers have constantly established that fibromyalgia patients have three times more pain-transmitting chemical called substance P in their spinal fluid and too little of the pain-reducing chemicals serotonin and norepinephrine that help control pain responses.
The most effective treatment that researchers have discovered have been options that are low-tech such as; getting better quality sleep and low impact exercise.
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