What is Fibromyalgia?
Fibromyalgia is a syndrome characterized by widespread pain often accompanied by brain fog, fatigue, memory or other cognitive issues, and insomnia. A mainstream understanding of fibromyalgia is that it is caused by a sort of “gain control” which is turned up too high in the brain, and the nervous system becomes hypersensitive to sensory signals.
The Mayo Clinic says that “While there is no cure for fibromyalgia, a variety of medications can help control symptoms. Exercise, relaxation and stress-reduction measures also may help.”
Dr. Howard Schubiner (in an extended interview from the film This Might Hurt) explains his view that fibromyalgia is curable:
Along with pain research colleagues Daniel Clauw, MD, and Mark Lumley, PhD, Dr. Schubiner authored a groundbreaking randomized study showing that a mind-body or neural-pathway-based treatment is twice as likely to give 50% reduction in pain, compared to the standard treatment. More research is needed. This study and others can be found on our evidence-based medicine page.
Can Fibromyalgia Be Unlearned?
Many researchers agree that fibromyalgia is caused by processes in the brain, the spine, and the nervous system. The key question is: is this something that needs to managed and coped with—and will not dramatically improve? Has the nervous system been irreversibly damaged? Or is it more like a learned, neuroplastic process, that could be unlearned, dramatically reduced, and even completely reversed?
Stories of Overcoming Fibromyalgia
Nancy Selfridge, MD has written a book with steps for overcoming fibromyalgia which she and her co-author used to recover from the disease themselves.
The TMS Wiki has collected dozens of stories of people reporting complete or semi-complete recoveries from fibromyalgia using a brain retraining approach to curing chronic pain.
Mainstream POV on Fibromyalgia
Daniel Clauw, MD (who appears in This Might Hurt as a skeptic of mind-body medicine) is a researcher who has worked closely with the drug industry testing drugs like Lyrica for fibromyalgia. He has also adjusted his views on mind-body medicine, after seeing that neuroplastic therapies showed promise in a study he co-authored with Howard Schubiner and other researchers.
In this revealing lecture, he says “I do a lot of consulting in the pharmaceutical industry… I am one of the leaders in the field of chronic pain. … One of the big problems we have in the chronic pain field is, we simply don’t have really effective drugs… compared to other diseases where there really have been fairly dramatic advances in the last 20-30 years.”
Despite his significant experience testing drugs for fibromyalgia, he says, “all patients with chronic pain should be using these non-drug approaches—they really should be the foundation of what you’re using to treat your chronic pain, and then add the drugs where they can be helpful.”