In my experience, fibromyalgia falls into three main categories:
- Mis-diagnosed fibromyalgia. Many people have overall, chronic body pain due to past accidents, athletic injuries, and other accumulated wear and tear. This is the most common type I see, and these patients do very well with a comprehensive treatment plan of manual therapy. They basically need the “dents and kinks” worked out one by one, restoring their body to the mobility and alignment they were meant to have.
- Toxic fibromyalgia. I see a lot of hairdressers with fibromyalgia. Their years of exposure to hair chemicals and dyes can cause overall body pain from the toxins in their body. Nutritional detox therapies may help in these cases, consulting a qualified health care provider is necessary.
- True fibromyalgia. Real fibromyalgia is mysterious, but science has found one thing about it: it is a problem of the central nervous system. People with fibromyalgia perceive pain differently, and they perceive a lot more of it. More and different parts of their brain light up when they feel pain, compared to a normal person. I have not found any way to fix this problem, but many of my patients with fibromyalgia come for treatment because they find treating their “dents and kinks” reduces their overall pain quite a bit. Also, the treatment methods I use are very gentle, which is often absolutely necessary for these patients.
