Chronic Pain: It’s all in Your Head (but not the way you think)

I read this article “Chronic Pain May Be All In the Brain” recently and couldn’t help but think “Well, DUH!” I think anyone with Fibromyalgia knows by now that the pain we have does not come from the site of the pain itself. My arm hurts doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with my arm. I thought doctors understood this by now. I thought it had been generally accepted that the chronic pain of Fibromyalgia was caused by an issue where the pain processors in the brain weren’t working correctly. Our on-board pain sensor chips have some wires crossed, there’s a short. Something taps that chip or a connected wire and instantly *ZING* we hurt. Sometimes we hurt just for a moment, sometimes that wire has a short in it and it stays a  little crooked and we continue to hurt for hours, or days.

Because evidence now suggests that a lot of pain comes from the brain and spinal cord and is more about a difference in how individuals sense pain.

Are there really still doctors that don’t get this? Evidently, there are. Then again there are still many doctors who don’t believe Fibromyalgia even exists. Their version of “it’s all in your head” is simply that it’s a psychological issue, we just need to get over. Go see a shrink and learn to relax more. Ignore it and it’ll go away. That’s now how it works!

There’s so much about the human body that we still don’t understand, and so much that so many refuse to understand because it’s just easier to accept old ways of thinking as fact.

This:

“The notion that I am trying to advance is that we all have a different volume control setting with respect to how pain sensitive we are and that’s largely set in the brain,” Professor Clauw told Rheumatology Update.

Exactly! This is why one person with Fibromyalgia may hurt worse than another. This is why we each experience pain differently. Somewhere there’s a volume control, and someone lost the freakin’ knob! So, now that volume control is stuck on what ever level it was left on when the knob fell off. The worst part is that at this point doctors aren’t even sure where the knob went in the first place, so we can’t even take a pair of pliers and adjust the volume. (My apologies to anyone who’s not old enough to understand that reference).

And then there’s this:

However one of the problems with increased sub-speciality care is a lot of doctors are just not asking enough questions.

“If someone goes in with knee pain they’ll just look at that person’s knee and won’t actually do a history and ask whether they are having pain in other parts of their body,” he said.

For those who haven’t been diagnosed this is why it takes so long. For those who have been diagnosed we end up with a whole new problem of having no idea whether that new pain is “just Fibro” or if it’s something we need to be concerned about and see a specialist for. If we are seeing someone for our Fibromyalgia, it’s likely that they will just pass it off as “just Fibromyalgia” and look no deeper, too often leaving us suffering from other issues that go undiagnosed.

[Tweet “Just because we have #Fibromyalgia, doesn’t mean every pain we have is “Just #Fibro””]

Related articles across the web

• Men With Fibromyalgia Often Go Undiagnosed
• What is so different about Fibromyalgia Pain?
• First objective measure of pain discovered in brain scan patterns
• Discovery could eventually help diagnose and treat chronic pain