Although symptoms are individual to each patient, the two most common symptoms fibromyalgia patients suffer from are chronic fatigue and widespread chronic pain.
The fatigue fibromyalgia patients experience is different than the average person feeling tired. It’s an intense, relentless fatigue (when you don’t care if the house burns down to the ground around you—you can’t get off your couch).
People with fibromyalgia talk about waking up day after day feeling exhausted with no energy. Usually, people who suffer from fibromyalgia feel more tired in the morning and many go back to sleep during the day to attempt to help their fatigue. Also, it’s common for people with fibromyalgia to have great difficulty focusing during the day, a symptom made worse by the fibro fog a lot of them already suffer from. While fibro fog is often attributed to sleep deprivation, Dr.Katinka believes that fibro fog is not caused by insomnia, but rather made worse by it. The involvement of the cranial nerves is a much likelier culprit.
The cranial nerves are twelve pairs of nerves on the ventral (bottom) surface of the brain. These nerves control a lot of important things, and their purpose is mainly to connect you with the world around your body. Think of these nerves as your nervous system’s front door to the world. These nerves allow you to hear, see, taste, and smell. Some of these nerves bring information from the sense organs to the brain. Some control muscles; others are connected to glands or internal organs such as the heart and lungs. One of the main functions of these nerves, in our caveman days and still today, is to perceive danger. We do this through our sensory nervous system. The cranial nerves in almost every fibromyalgia patient show abnormalities.
Another one of the most difficult symptoms (to deal with as well as diagnose) with fibromyalgia is the widespread chronic pain – and for a lot of fibromyalgia patients, it’s migrating pain.
You may have low back pain one day, pain in your feet the next, and bladder problems on another.
Unfortunately, if your symptoms are shifting all over the place, doctors are trained to think that you may just be looking for a free ride or attention. Now, add to this the mysterious, ever-changing list of symptoms fibromyalgia patients suffer from. It’s tough to diagnose and treat. I like to refer to this phenomenon as “whack-a-mole” in our clinic. Just when you manage to whack one symptom down, another pops up.
Of course, once again, the symptoms of fibromyalgia make this condition extremely puzzling and tricky to treat. Let’s look at the reasons that may cause your symptoms to appear mysterious.
Think of your nervous system as your electrical system. In your case, it isn’t connecting. This is not merely Dr.Katinka’s opinion, but also based on some sound research. One of the lead investigators studying the role of the central nervous system (CNS) in fibromyalgia, Dr. Daniel Clauw, remarked that not only do abnormalities in the brain and central nervous system seem to “spill over” into the body and produce the collection of symptoms we know as fibromyalgia, but there is also evidence that injuries, illnesses, or other major stressors in the body can overwhelm the brain and CNS and cause different symptoms.1
More recently, Manuel Martínez-Lavín, MD, and his team at the National Cardiology Institute of Mexico used a special technology known as heart rate variability analysis to demonstrate that the multi-systemic symptoms of fibromyalgia (i.e., pain, insomnia, numbness and tingling, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, etc.) are in fact a result of a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The automatic system regulates body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate as well as bowel and bladder tone, and is capable of acting with great rapidity and intensity.2 In other words, your nervous system very well may be on the fritz, resulting in a lot of the symptoms you suffer from.
References
1 Richard H. Gracely et al., Functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence of augmented pain processing in fibromyalgia (Article first published online May 8, 2002)
2 M. Martínez-Lavín, The Autonomic Nervous System and Fibromyalgia. The Clinical Neurobiology of Fibromyalgia and Myofascial Pain: Therapeutic Implications(Binghamton, NY: The Haworth Press, 2002), 221-228
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