Introduction to Fibromyalgia Symptoms and Possible Causes
Fibromyalgia surely ranks with the most annoying, if not the most debilitating of the long-term, chronic medical conditions. The symptoms run the gamut from nerve and muscle pain to nausea, constipation, and diarrhea. WebMD.com gives the following list of potential symptoms:
- Muscle pain/spasms/tightness
- Fatigue, decreased, or low energy
- Insomnia and/or fatigue on awakening
- Waking stiffness or stiffness after staying in one position
- Reduced memory, concentration, or cognition
- Irritable bowel syndrome, bloating, cramps, constipation, and diarrhea
- Tension or migraine headaches
- Temporomandibular Joint Disorders (TMJ) or tenderness of jaw muscles
- Odor, food, or light sensitivities
- Depression or anxiety
- Tingling or numbness in the extremities
- Irritable bladder syndrome, i.e., needing to go frequently
- Low or reduced tolerance for exercise
- A sense of swelling of hands or feet without actual swelling
Fibromyalgia suffers may experience one, some, or all of these symptoms but, and this is the real rub, no one really knows why. Speculation focuses on factors from genetics to pollution and from stress to hormonal imbalances. Medical science performs very well in identifying the causes and treatments for specific issues, but not well at all when symptoms are diffuse and non-specific. Still, while doctors don’t offer a magic bullet for fibromyalgia their approach to treating generic illness, trial and error, nevertheless offers sufferers hope. Discuss all speculative self-treatments with your doctor.
Part I: Diet
1 Exclude Inflammatory Foods
Since fibromyalgia often presents with food testing an exclusionary diet might help. The big seven known inflammatory foods are: tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, honey, milk, wheat, and peanuts. Most of the trouble with tomatoes comes from the skin and seeds. If you have inflammation, difficulty concentrating, or ADD/ADHD it’s not a bad idea to try excluding them instead of taking drugs. Allergenic and inflammatory foods can sometimes be reintroduced to the diet later.
2 Eat Cooked Foods
It’s hard to extract much nutrition from raw veggies and the brain only runs on glucose from the liver. One of the problems with a raw food diet is that its associated weight loss amounts to starvation. How you cook food matters, too. For example, a low-inflammation diet calls for a lot of soups and stews because they are cooked at low temperatures. In turn, that means less cross-glycolated proteins to put pressure on the liver and cause inflammation.
3 Try eating seafood regularly
Most people do fine without meat protein. The problem is that our soils and waters are minerally depleted. That has been known since the 1930s. Two things came from the US Senate-commissioned studies of soil demineralization . First, we reorganized the processed food industry to produce minerally fortified products, hence all the additives. Most of that happened in the 1940s and 1950s, though salt was iodized after 1924. Second, the livestock growers started feeding minerals. That causes other problems. In particular, they overfeed by about 10-to-1 to get enough bioavailable minerals. Most people get their minerals from meat. However, although nutritionists usually tell vegetarians that they have to take vitamin B-12 supplements–it’s bioavailable cobalt bound by a protein–most of them ignore the other trace minerals. Ocean fish provides those trace minerals, but it’s a good idea to avoid large fish like tuna in favor of smaller fish like salmon or sardines because of their lower levels of mercury.
4 Watch, but Don’t Worry Your Fats
The human body produces it’s own healthy fats. The brain is mostly fat. Maintaining it requires the body to manufacture very high quality phospholipids like DHA. Retinal cells use a lot of high quality phospholipids, too. Likewise all cell walls contain phospholipids. By contrast, fish oil is mostly triglycerides. Krill oil is an excellent source of choline, but you can easily get all the choline you need from two eggs and a slice of bacon, or by eating plenty of meat, and/or wheat germ. Most dietary fat gets digested, not absorbed. Most of what doesn’t get digested passes in bowel movements. A quick look into the toilet serves as a simple test of whether you’re eating too much dietary fat—greasy stools float.
5 Balance Your Proteins
Nutritionists can be quite vague about protein intake. However, in their book Protein Power, medical doctors Michael and Mary Dan Eades give more specific advice. Here’s an approximate formula as it relates to exercise:
Grams protein per day per pound of lean body mass
0 exercise: 0.5
1: 0.6
2: 0.7
3: 0.8
4: 0.9
5 athletic training: 1.0
Notice that you’ll need a body composition test to follow this advice accurately. Electrical impedance tests of lean body mass aren’t very accurate. Water displacement tests are better. These days, vendors provide lean body mass tests in most cities. Then it’s just plug-chug-go
6 Overall Diets
Until very recently most diet studies were of very modest quality. However, some researchers have begun to break that mold. In particular, Stanford’s A-to-Z study, while preliminary, tracked more than 300 pre-menopausal, overweight women for a full year. The participants were assigned randomly to follow Atkins (extremely low carbohydrate), Zone (low-carbohydrate, high protein), Ornish (very low fat), or USDA/Food LEARN (high carbohydrate/moderate-low fat) diet. The researches found that the women assigned to follow the Atkins diet both lost more weight (~10 pounds average weight lost in 1 year) and recorded metabolic effects as good or better than the other diets.
7 Spice Things Up
Countries with underdeveloped healthcare systems rely on eating a variety of foods to maintain good health. Remember the Big 5 spices: cinnamon, turmeric, ground coriander seed, ground fennel, and ground ginger. Research finds benefits to all five.
Part II: Sleep
Like diet, the topic of sleep attracts a lot of bad information. For example, while the modern 8-hour sleep cycle conforms to the modern work environment and the dominance of the electric light, that doesn’t make it ‘natural’ in the sense that most people use that term. From colonial records, we know that in the absence of electric lights, within a short period the sleep pattern deviates from the modern norm, often splitting into two sleeps divided by a period awake. Be that as it may, most people don’t enjoy the option of following their own natural sleeping pattern. Unfortunately, that means finding a way to conform to someone else’s schedule. Some tips:
8 Maintain Good Sleep Hygiene
In most cases, maintaining good sleep hygiene means avoiding daytime napping, and stimulants like coffee, tea, or chocolate before bed, as well as, sticking to a set waking time, and spending an adequate amount of time in bed. In addition, good sleepers associate their beds with sleep. That means no TV, reading, or radio in bed. Since alcohol disrupts deep sleep, avoid drinking before bed. Also, take the time to discuss any problems like sleep apnea or gastric reflux with a qualified doctor.
9 Get a Better Bed
Another factor within our control that often gets overlooked is a worn out or otherwise uncomfortable bed. An inadequate bed puts extra stress on pressure points and leads to the sort of tossing and turning that can cause the sort of micro-tears in muscles associated with fibromyalgia. Similarly, a physical therapist, doctor, or chiropractor can recommend a perfect, water-filled pillow that’s right for you.
10 Stay Warm at Night
This one is tough. Experts warn that using electric heating pads and blankets can lead to permanent loss of the body’s ability to regulate temperature. However, in their highly recommended manual The Arthritis Helpbook, Kate Loring and James Fries take the opposite tack saying: “Heat is most effective for reducing the pain associated with muscle tension and stiffness, and when there is little or no inflammation. It works by increasing the blood flow to the skin and muscles around the painful area. This, in turn, enhances muscle nutrition and relaxation. When the muscles relax, pain and stiffness decrease…. Warm baths, showers, a hot tub, sauna, or electric mattress pads are good ways to help soothe the whole body; these methods may be particularly beneficial for the person with fibromyalgia.” Alternatively, for those worried about body temperature self-regulation, pre-warming the bed or using microwavable foot warmers may reduce muscle spasms and other sleep disrupting problems with cold feet.
11 Self-Hypnosis/Sleep Recordings/White Noise
Psychologists and professional hypnotherapists have produced positively affirming sleep recordings for the mass market, many of which are freely available online or at low cost. Similarly, just as a sleep mask cuts off excess light, commercially available white noise generators mask distracting sound that could disrupt sleep.
Part III: Stress Management
In addition to evidence that fibromyalgia stems from general dietary issues, genetic factors, and sleep disorders, evidence suggests that some sufferers benefit significantly from techniques designed to decrease stress and increase a sense of well-being. These fall into two broad categories, balneotherapy/heat therapy/therapeutic massage, and brain oxygenation.
12 Massage and Heat Therapy
Balneotherapy, the scientific term for bath therapy covers a lot of ground from just taking a regular warm bath to a routine part of physical therapy. As a common element, these techniques heal and relax the body using heat, commonly through the use of an appliance like a hot tub, Jacuzzi, heated pool, or a heated float tank. Modern saunas and steam rooms often incorporate infrared heat therapy, which penetrates beyond the surface of the skin. Infrared pads and handheld self-massage appliances have become much more available. Standard massage and ultrasound may help, as well.
12 Brain Oxygenation
The old saying that laughter is the bed medicine holds a lot of truth. According to the Mayo Clinic laughter, it turns out releases endorphins, the body’s natural pain meds. Other entertainments like music induce the same effect. That in turn suggests a strategy that is at once new and very old, meditation. Newcomers to meditation general agree that while it won’t heal all ills, it will make most people feel at least 10% better. The real benefits often come from the practice of both deep regular breathing and bioenergetic breathing. Most people know about deep breathing. Bioenergetic breathing adds the additional element of breathing fast, rather than just deep. It’s an assertive, explosive form of breathing, not unlike laughing, that releases endorphins while realigning the ribs, shoulders and spine.
Part IV: Exercise
Everyone recommends exercise to help fibromyalgia symptoms. The trouble is that exercise often hurts. It might be useful to consider exercise in gradual stages from the very light to the moderate.
13 Exercise In Bed
That’s right. Ever since Sanford Bennett (The Man Who Grew Young) wrote Exercising in Bed back in 1907, some people have taken his advice. The range of gentle self-massage and exercises that can be performed while warm and comfortable is really limited only by the imagination. Granted, it won’t turn you into an aerobics instructor, at least not overnight, but it can help to relieve muscle strain and improve joint mobility.
14 Myofascial Self-Release
The next step up from light exercise in bed, myofascial self-release focuses on maintaining skeletal alignment and releasing tension at muscular pressure points all over the body. Despite the hype, the truth about stretching is that it takes a long time to make any progress.
15 Yoga, etc.
Most people don’t realize it, but the original purpose of yoga was gentle, self-help for healing. Practices like yoga, Tai Chi, Qigong, gentle walks, and light swimming all help the body heal itself. If it’s too hard, remember that you can limit the amount of time you exercise between periods of rest.
Part V: Supplements
Never mind the echo chamber on the pharmaceutical companies dietary supplements make the companies that sell them a lot of money, too. Here’s one that might matter, either in the form of nicotinic acid or nicotinamide:
16 Niacin
In a 2008 study in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers at the University of California at Irvine gave the human dose equivalent of 2,000 to 3,000 mg of vitamin B3 to mice with Alzheimer’s. (2) It worked. Kim Green, one of the researchers, is quoted as saying, “Cognitively, they were cured. They performed as if they’d never developed the disease.”
Now, let’s agree that Alzheimer’s is not quite the same as fibromyalgia. However, both affect the nervous system. And both conditions may be helped by niacin. Beware of pills, though. Fibromyalgia sufferers may be sensitive to the bulk fillers pill manufacturers use. Both nicotinic acid and niacinamide/nicotinamide are available in bulk in their pure form.
17 Other Supplements That Might Help
Some of the more common supplements that fibromyalgia sufferers recommend include Vitamin D-3, ginseng, reishi mushroom, cordyceps mushroom extract, and iodine. Vitamin D affects circadian rhythm so remember to take it in the morning, not at bedtime. Iodine may help if fibromyalgia symptoms are associated with a thyroid issue. The others may affect other hormone levels. Talk to your doctor before taking any supplements.
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