Coping With Fibromyalgia
I have just been diagnosed with fibromyalgia… what now?
You may be feeling relieved to finally have a diagnosis after what seems like an eternity of searching for answers. Or you may be feeling frustrated that there is no simple cure for this painful syndrome.
Fibromyalgia does not need to take over your life. You can keep it under control, to an extent. This guide is intended to explain to you the many ways in which you can cope with fibromyalgia.
How to Cope
Unfortunately there is currently no magic pill or cure-all treatment for fibromyalgia. However, the following treatments and coping mechanisms help many fibromyalgia sufferers to cope:
For any kind of pain, I recommend a TENS machine. A TENS machine blocks pain sensors using electrical impulses. It is not painful, it feels a bit like a vibration through the muscle. I got mine on ebay for £7.50 – WELL worth it! If you set the impulses to a low frequency, the electrical impulses are supposed to stimulate your muscle tissues to heal themselves. When set to a high frequency, the impulses block out the pain. Most of the coping mechanisms below are aimed at fixing or at least reducing the problems and gaining some control. A TENS machine is more about just blocking out the pain on those days when it feels like too much to handle.
Medication, supplements and diet changes
Low-dose anti-depressant medications are often prescribed for fibromyalgia sufferers to be taken at night. This is to increase serotonin production by the brain, improving the quality of sleep and causing the muscles to relax. 5-HTP is a natural supplement that can be used as an alternative to low-dose anti-depressants.
DO NOT TAKE 5-HTP IF YOU ARE TAKING ANTI-DEPRESSANTS.
Magnesium and calcium supplements help muscles to relax and improve sleep and anxiety problems.
Adding flax (AKA linseed) to your diet can help you to reach a deeper level of sleep by regulating serotonin production. It can also reduce hair loss and help mood swings.
Cherry juice naturally blocks pain sensors and reduces pain for a lot of fibromyalgia patients. It is also a natural anti-inflammatory. Fibromyalgia is not generally associated with inflammation, however some fibromyalgia suffers have inflammation as well. Inflammation can be reduced by supplementing your diet with natural anti-inflammatories such as omega-3 fish oils, vitamin E, pomegranate juice, pineapple juice and shark cartilage (AKA chondroitin).
There are many diet changes that have been associated with recovery from fibromyalgia. Here are a few examples:
An aspartame-free / caffeine-free diet - both aspartame and caffeine cause many fibromyalgia sufferers to go into a flare.
A nightshade-free diet - many fibromyalgia sufferers are allergic to nightshades (tomatoes, mushrooms, etc, see the Fibromyalgia Diet website for more info, link given below)
The candida diet - sometimes candida problems do not manifest themselves as thrush, but as fibromyalgia symptoms. In these cases it is possible for the sufferer to fully recover if they go on the candida diet (strictly!) and use a variety of probiotic supplements.
The two websites that I have found most helpful for fibromyalgia diets and candida diets are:
http://www.ctds.info/fibromyalgia-diet.html - written by a lady who suffers from fibromyalgia (and several other health complaints) herself. The reason I like this site so much is because the lady who wrote it does a lot of research and tries to find out why certain foods aggravate or help her symptoms.
http://wholeapproachforums.com/6/ubb.x?a=cfrm&cdra=Y&s=660609395 - if you scroll down to the Recipes section you will see why I like this site! It lists hundreds of candida recipes for breakfast, main meals, snacks and treats. This makes the candida diet a lot easier for someone who is overwhelmed by all the restrictions and doesn't know what they CAN eat!
Therapies
There are many popular protocols that you can look into, that aim to heal the body and give it what it needs. The most popular are Dr. St. Amand’s “Guaifenesin Protocol” and Dr. John Gray’s “Shake”, both of which are well worth looking into.
Trigger point therapy massage forces painful muscle knots to release. (See the Trigger Point Therapy page for more details)
Chiropractic treatment can help to re-align the body and decrease pain.
Physiotherapy can teach you how to improve your posture, thus preventing so many muscle knots from forming due to imbalances in your body.
Hypnotic therapy helps many people with fibromyalgia to separate stress from tensing up physically. Listening to hypnotic relaxation CDs when trying to get to sleep can help patients reach a deeper level of sleep.
Posture and Lifestyle Changes
If your posture is poor, more and more painful muscle knots will form, so it is important not to slouch or strain your muscles.
The position in which you sleep is very important. Sleep on your back with a pillow folded over under your knees to take the strain off your lower back and prevent knee pain. Foam pillows make a big difference to the level of neck pain because they give your neck far better support than soft pillows.
See below for more information about the importance of sleep in coping with fibromyalgia.
If you are given exercises or stretches to do, be very wary of the ones where you tense a muscle then relax it. Muscles of fibromyalgia patients do not relax properly after being tensed, so this can increase your pain.
Adding Epsom salts to a hot bath or soaking your feet in very hot water with Epsom salts dissolved in it is a very quick way of getting magnesium (a natural muscle relaxant) into the body to relax your muscles.
Saunas and heat lamps are very beneficial because the heat relaxes your muscles. Generally keeping warm is important for preventing more pain and tension, because when you have fibromyalgia once your body tenses up from shivering, it will not relax properly again.
Heat patches, muscle rubs and painkilling gels can offer some relief. I find menthol muscle rubs the most effective.
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Most importantly, at some point you will probably be told by people who you thought understood that they think it might be in your head, or that you just need to exercise more, or that it's because you have a bad diet, etc… This may have already happened to you. When this happens, it is important to remember that YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
You can join a support group or an online messageboard or chat room (I recommend www.fibromyalgiachat.com - the proHealth messageboard and chat room) or visit www.diagnosesupport.com where you can use the "Contact Us" form to contact me or one of the other members of the Diagnose Support team. We understand that fibromyalgia is a real, valid illness.
Although it is difficult for those who do not understand what it is like to live with a chronic illness to know what to say to you, you can help them to understand by educating them about fibromyalgia.
Fibromyalgia Awareness Day is May 12th. Please help to increase awareness by educating your friends and families about fibromyalgia.
The Importance of Sleep
Most fibromyalgia sufferers have sleep problems, whether it is getting to sleep, staying asleep or reaching a deep level of sleep.
I find that sleeping on my back with a pillow folded over under my knees is the best position for me. It is important to sleep on your back if you have fibromyalgia so that your body is balanced. If you are not balanced, then muscle knots will form all over your body and these can cause a lot of pain!
It is important to put something under your knees to keep them bent, because this takes the strain off your lower back. This also helps keep my knee and hip pain down. It took a long time for me to get used to sleeping on my back but I find that if I sleep on my back for a couple of months, my shoulder pain goes right down, but just one night of sleeping on my side puts me back to square one of excruciating pain.
Sleeping on your front is even worse for your body, because nerves can become trapped in your neck, causing horrible shooting pains and tendons in your neck become stretched so much that they will ache. If you ever feel like you have a pebble trapped under your shoulderblade then you are probably trapping a nerve when you sleep on your front or your side. This is very common for fibromyalgia sufferers who do not sleep on their backs and it is very difficult to get rid of that trapped pebble feeling.
A foam pillow has made a big difference to my neck pain. Soft ones don't give the right support for the neck and as I said before, any imbalance in the muscles in the neck can in turn lead to muscle knots forming all down the spine and around the shoulder blades.
I try to remember to listen to a Paul McKenna relaxation CD called “Sleep Like A Log” every night when I am trying to get to sleep. It is supposed to make you reach a deeper level of sleep. It helps when I remember to use it regularly!
Magnesium and calcium are natural muscle relaxants that also have a calming effect and help some fibromyalgia patients with sleep.
Recent studies about fibromyalgia indicate that the extreme muscle tension is caused by the brain not producing enough of one or more chemicals during sleep, to make the muscles relax properly. The chemical that is lacking during sleep is often serotonin, which is why fibromyalgia patients are often prescribed low-dose antidepressants to take at night. These help the patient to have better quality sleep so that the muscles relax properly.
There are natural alternatives to anti-depressants. I sometimes take 5-HTP supplements to increase my seretonin production while I sleep and they seem to help as well as anti-depressants, though you can only take one or the other, 5-HTP cannot be taken in conjunction with anti-depressants! If 5-HTP does not have a strong enough effect, you can try any one (or several) of the following: St John’s Wort, Selenium, Starflower Oil, Evening Primrose Oil or Flax. However, please discuss this with your doctor before you start taking any supplements. Some people can have very different reactions to supplements than others and there may be side-effects that I have not experienced. It is very important to drink a lot more water than you would normally when taking any of the above, because anything that increases serotonin tends to dehydrate the patient and in particular 5-HTP is known for causing headaches due to dehydration.
Serotonin is not the chemical lacking in all fibromyalgia patients, however. For some it is dopamine. There has been a lot of research carried out about dopamine recently and a relatively new drug - Mirapex - is on the market in most countries for fibromyalgia and restless leg syndrome sufferers. The best natural source of dopamine is dark chocolate – 40g of dark chocolate per night is actually prescribed for some fibromyalgia patients in America! Another chemical often lacking in FM patients is GABA and (hooray!) one of the best natural sources for GABA is red wine. So there's a good excuse to eat chocolate and drink wine!
Now this sounds simple, but don't just skim over. Leaving the window open for 10 minutes or so before you go to bed can help you to fall asleep quicker. This is because there are more negative ions in fresh air and inhaling negative ions can promote calmness and better quality sleep. If you live in a very polluted area it may be worth buying an ionizer. It does not need to be large or expensive. I have a small ionizer, which only takes a few minutes to fill the room with billions of negative ions.
Lavender is known to promote sleep and a sense of calmness too. If you pour some lavender oil onto a tissue and keep it next to your pillow, you will find that over time you will begin to subconsciously associate the smell of lavender with sleep. This can be surprisingly powerful and help you to get to sleep quicker at night.
As with all of the information on this website, please discuss it with your doctor before making any changes to your lifestyle or diet and do not take supplements unless you have discussed them with a doctor, because they may interact with your medication. Think of these suggestions as a starting point, something to discuss with your doctor. Please do not assume that I know everything! 
Trigger Point Therapy
Trigger point therapy (AKA myofascial release) can be very beneficial to people who have a lot of pain from myofascial knots. The concept of trigger point therapy is to press so hard on the muscle knot that it is forced to release. It can be very painful for a few seconds, but is usually worth it for the relief that follows. You can either go to a masseur who is trained in trigger point therapy or you can do it yourself. If your knots are very tight, it is better to go to someone who is trained in trigger point therapy, because they can press harder than you could yourself. It is also better to have someone else do it for you because it can hurt your hands a lot to tense them so much.
To do trigger point therapy on yourself it is worth investing in "The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook" by Claire Davies. You can use a tennis ball to work out those knots as follows! Lie on the floor and wedge the tennis ball under you, so that it is pressing into the muscle knots around your shoulders. Then just roll around on it until you can feel the pressure releasing. If the knots are too tight and will not release, you may find that it works better in a sauna, where the heat makes the muscles more prone to relaxation. You can just take your tennis ball in with you and lie on a towel and work those knots out! If it is too painful for you to lie on the tennis ball, you can put the tennis ball in a sock and sit with your back against a wall and hang the tennis-ball-in-sock creation over your shoulder.
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