Signs of fibromyalgia
Dr. R: I’m Dr. Martin Rutherford. I’m a board certified
chiropractic physician and, more importantly to you, I am a Certified
Functional Medicine Practitioner. This is Dr. Randall Gates.
Dr. G: I am Chiropractor and a Board Certified Chiropractic
Neurologist.
Dr. R: And we treat mostly, our practice is mostly treating
chronic pain and chronic pain conditions. We treat a lot of fibromyalgia
and I think I am uniquely qualified in this, as I have fibromyalgia, and so
I have that perspective on it also.
We’re going to talk about signs. We see a lot of people are
searching for the signs of fibromyalgia.
We’re going to cover it from kinda two different perspectives in the
next few minutes. The way we work our practice, is, we kind of, we sort of
qualify patients that come in, relative to, if they’re going to be really
someone who can respond to the types of non drug therapies that we do and,
so I’m kind of, people come to us with fibromyalgia, they’ve either made a
self diagnosis off the internet, maybe one of their doctors have diagnosed
it. There’s really, as most of you already know who are watching this,
there’s really not a good diagnostic scheme in the medical model. We’re
not anti-medicine by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just that
fibromyalgia, as you probably already learned, doesn’t really lend itself
to the medical model.
Most people that come in are wondering if they have it, or they’ve
been diagnosed with it.
From my perspective, these are the things that tell me the patient
may have fibromyalgia. Patient comes walking in to the consult with a
thick file form ten different doctors that they’ve been to. That’s always
a sign because you’ve been from doctor to doctor to doctor to doctor.
Nobody really knows, nobody’s really helping you.
You’re kind of maybe wondering if it’s in your head. Maybe it’s been
implied that it’s in your head, or that maybe it’s been implied that you
need to see a psychologist while you’re sitting there and you know for a
fact that you are hurting and you’re having all these problems.
Another thing else that will let me know in the beginning that I’m
probably listening to a fibro history is, you have stacks of testing, and
the blood tests are normal. There’s a lot of reasons for that. The
testing that really is required is poorly understood. A lot of times it’s
not covered by insurance companies. A lot of times it’s not interpreted
right because the doctors just aren’t familiar with these cases.
A lot of times people just come walking in with two big bags. One of
them has a lot of supplements in it. The other has five to 25 medications
in it. And, in the functional medicine world, we’re looking at that and
going, “Autoimmune problem, probably autoimmune problem, definitely a
possibility of fibromyalgia here.”
Patient walks in to me and tells me that I’m going to be the hardest
patient that they’ve ever had. These are the type of mental thought
processes that, if you’re having them, if you’re having these type of
things. If you’ve got the, you know, three tiered lazy susan of drugs and
supplements.
If you’re having problem with your spouse or significant other
because they don’t really understand why you’re so tired and you look good.
You look relatively healthy but, you can’t get out of bed, that’s another
sign.
Rest of transcription can be found at http://powerhealthtalk.com/signs-of-fibromyalgia.htm
