An article in the New York Times this week talks about a new drug for fibromyalgia which has been aggressively marketed in the states. The thing is that this drug, which apparently manages to reduce the pain, causes weight gain, swelling, dizziness and sleepiness. Is this drug helping or hindering the healing process? I will leave you to make up your own minds. But when the body is suffering even more after the visit to the doctor, maybe its time to not go to the doctor for the cure! I found it interesting that Dr. Nortin Hadler, a rheumatologist and professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina who has written extensively about fibromyalgia said “The diagnosis of fibromyalgia itself worsens the condition by encouraging people to think of themselves as sick and catalog their pain” Lets face it when we get a label we then tend to start to fulfil it!
“These people live under a cloud,” he said. “And the more they seem to be around the medical establishment, the sicker they get.” This is something I really do agree with, I don’t see how on the whole the medical establishment are helping to heal people, when the medications they are giving them are giving them even more symptoms.
Dr. Frederick Wolfe, the director of the National Databank for Rheumatic Diseases and the lead author of the 1990 paper that first defined the diagnostic guidelines for fibromyalgia, says he has become cynical and discouraged about the diagnosis. He now considers the condition a physical response to stress, depression, and economic and social anxiety.
“Some of us in those days thought that we had actually identified a disease, which this clearly is not,” Dr. Wolfe said. “To make people ill, to give them an illness, was the wrong thing.”
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