Not that it’s news to those of us who have it, but it’s good to be validated!
Fibromyalgia often has been misdiagnosed as arthritis or even a psychological issue. Increasingly, though, the scientific knowledge about fibromyalgia is growing, and a new paper from the University of Michigan Health System says there are “overwhelming data” that the condition is real, is characterized by a lower pain threshold and is associated with genetic factors that can make some people more likely to develop fibromyalgia. …
“It is time for us to move past the rhetoric about whether these conditions are real, and take these patients seriously as we endeavor to learn more about the causes and most effective treatments for these disorders,” says Richard E. Harris, Ph.D., research investigator in the Division of Rheumatology at the U‑M Medical School’s Department of Internal Medicine and a researcher at the U‑M Health System’s Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center.
The name of one of the authors of the paper, Dr. Daniel J. Clauw, will be familiar to many of you from other studies on fibromyalgia. He says that, “In people without pain, these structures encode pain sensations normally. In people with fibromyalgia, the neural activity increased. These studies indicate that fibromyalgia patients have abnormalities within their central brain structures.”
ScienceDaily: Pain From Fibromyalgia Is Real, Researchers Say