This information is provided free of charge from the caring doctors of Kukurin Chiropractic & Acupuncture Network. Our office is rated one of the top practices in the country by the Consumer's Research Council of America The results our patients obtain with painful conditions are so dramatic they have been published in the National Library of Medicine.

If you are in pain call us right away, our award winner doctor has over 20 years of experience in helping people just like you.

Kukurin Chiropractic Network

Kukurin Chiropractic & Acupuncture 12409 W Indian School Rd C304

Avondale, AZ 85392

623.547-4727

Click on the office address for a printable map
 

Many additional research studies were conducted on the muscles of fibromyalgia patients.  Report after report seemed to suggest that their was “some” type of abnormality in the muscles of patients suffering with fibromyalgia, but the findings were non-specific. The same abnormalities were found in asymptomatic non-patients.  This means that yes something was unusual in the fibromyalgia patient, but patients who had other diseases or no disease at all had the same type of general muscle findings.  This contradiction  lead many medical doctors to believe that fibromyalgia was “all in the patient’s head”.  Perhaps you have been to a doctor who didn’t seem to believe you when you described your pain to him?  Many patients were actually  sent to see psychiatrists. Still today many patients with fibromyalgia are given anti-depressant medications as a treatment.

Thankfully, new research has emerged that has proven very helpful to patients suffering from fibromyalgia. See while early research reports found common muscle abnormalities in fibromyalgia patients, newer research suggests that fibromyalgia is a problem in the nervous system.  The muscles have little or nothing to do with the cause of  your  pain.

So if my muscles are normal why do they ache all the time?  It certainly feels like your muscles ache when you have fibromyalgia.  In fact one of the ways we diagnose fibromyalgia is to press on the muscles to see if they are sensitive.  The pain is very real in fibromyalgia, but it is not coming from the muscles.  To understand the pain of fibromyalgia, you must first understand how the nervous system deals with pain. I want you to think of a radio.  Specifically the dial on the radio that controls how loud the music plays. We are going to use the radio as an example of how your body deals with pain.  When the tissues of the body become over stressed and irritated they activate the nerves that carry pain signals to the brain.  This is like turning the radio volume up.  The brain and spinal cord however, have their own switches that turn the pain signals down or off.  Just like lowering the loudness on the radio.  So you have irritation-pain and then the pain is normally turned off.  At least that is how it is supposed to work.

I’d like to keep this as simple as possible, but we must talk about one more thing so you can get the big picture.  The “switch” in the body that is supposed to turn down the pain, uses a chemical called serotonin to operate. Without getting too technical serotonin activates several pain control switches in the brain and spinal cord.  So in people without  fibromyalgia, when pain signals enter the spinal cord on their way to the brain, serotonin is released and activates many different switches to turn off the pain signal.  In other words if the music is too loud serotonin turns down the radio.  This doesn’t happen in fibro patients, because there are defects in their pain suppressing machinery.

So why doesn’t serotonin turn off my pain signals like it’s supposed to?        Continue reading to find out!!

Fibromyalgia is a Brain Disease

Not a Muscle Disease: Part I

Historically, patients with fibromyalgia were thought to have muscle inflammation, later muscle pain. Recent microscopic studies of muscle reveal no specific problems within the muscle of fibromyalgia patients.