My husband, who is an internist, has had to treat people with fibromyalgia. He's found that a good deal of people with fibromyalgia are hypochondriacs (so that has warped his view of people with fibromyalgia). He calls it a junk diagnosis because they don't know how else to diagnose certain conditions. If you've ever read the symptoms for it, it's so vauge so as to make one wonder that the disease was created as a catch all. It's often diagnosed until a more specific diagnosis comes along. But that's the problem with auto-immune diseases like fibromyalgia and lupus, for example. They are very difficult to diagnose, understand, and treat. They are very strange diseases.
You're right in that fibro and CFS are catch-all diseases--in the westernized medical world, at least. A doctor listens to your symptoms and says, "Oh, you're horribly tired all the time? You have chronic fatigue," or "You're muscles hurt all over? You have fibromyalgia"--but then they tell you that these conditions are untreatable. Except that an antidepressant could make some of the pain and fatigue go away.
Um, no thank you. I don't want to take a pill and mask my symptoms--I want to find the root of the problem and FIX it. There
has to be a reason my body is acting this way. I want you to figure out what's causing it, not just throw more chemicals with strange side-affects into my already sensitive body.
Anyway, this is what happened to me when I came home from my mission so weak and sick I couldn't even keep food in my body. The doctors I'd been to weren't providing any real answers--just more mysterious diagnosis and a variety of pills to try. So my mom and I began researching it--reading everything we could get our hands on. Research led us to alternative medicine. The doctor I ended up working with was a chiropractor. He was the first of over five doctors of various persuasions and abilities who looked me in the eyes and said, "You will get better again. I can help you get better again." And he did.
Unfortunately, it turned out that wasn't the end of my health journey. But I still find that when I try to take a pill to solve my problems (like an experience with Zoloft), I get worse; when I change my diet and go to a doctor who works on addressing the core of my body, like my bowels, adrenals, and liver (which apparently have stopped working for me right now--that's the first thing I'm addressing currently) and strengthening them with natural remedies that don't have side affects, I get better. But that's me. Everyone has to find what works for them. For example, I've decided if after I get my body strong and healthy I still have depression, I will take an antidepressant. But right now I don't think my depression is neurologically based. I think it is a result of my body being in a toxic and malfunctioning condition.
And I don't hate all doctors. I just have had, unfortunately, more bad experiences with M.D.s than with alternative health doctors. Almost every "western" medical doctor I go to wants to give me a drug after listening to me for only five minutes. Now, I don't buy that.
My husband, who is an internist, has had to treat people with fibromyalgia. He's found that a good deal of people with fibromyalgia are hypochondriacs (so that has warped his view of people with fibromyalgia).
And I have to say that what your husband says about most people with fibro bothers me. Simply because it is not easy to see, diagnose, or treat does not mean it isn't real. I am in real pain. And these diseases
do have causes. Just not ones that most medical doctors seem willing to admit, because the remedies involve a different philosophy of medicine. The medical doctors I have gotten along with are ones who incorporate the proven research and effects of natural health into their practices, rather than always plugging the pharmecutical companies as the end-all, be-all answer.
