Taking the Mystery Out of the Fibromyalgia Diagnosis

If you head to your doctor with complaints of body-wide pain for three months or more, they will try to rule out several well-known causes, such as arthritis, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, and muscle strain.

If those causes can be ruled out, they may then consider a diagnosis of Fibromyalgia, especially if you are also fatigued. Fibromyalgia is medical jargon for chronic transient pain of unknown cause with no known effective treatment. 

When Conventional Treatment Only Masks the Pain

When you receive that diagnosis, you are then told to take it easy, eat and sleep well, exercise regularly, and perhaps even go to talk therapy, all of which is generally good “advice” given to any human being, regardless of physical suffering. You’ll have good days and bad, and you’re told that you need to learn to live with it.

You’re frustrated, in pain, and have no idea if it will ever go away.

You may begin to feel like your own body is attacking you. The best they have to offer are OTC pain relievers. No one can tell you why. You’re frustrated, in pain, and have no idea if it will ever go away.

I want to assure you: There is a reason it’s happening, and you most certainly can be free of this miserable condition. The cause of chronic pain is a dysfunction of your stress response system, commonly known as Adrenal Fatigue.

I’ll break down the relationship between the two here.

The Connection Between Adrenal Fatigue and Fibromyalgia 

Cortisol, your main stress hormone, serves as your body’s primary anti-inflammatory function. Your adrenal glands produce that cortisol. If the adrenals are taxed, and you cannot produce adequate anti-inflammatory cortisol, you will be overly inflamed. 

It creates tremendous wear and tear in the body. And we know that cortisol and adrenaline will hit nerves throughout the body, central nervous system, peripheral nervous system, autonomic nervous system, throughout the body, and it sensitizes those nerves, it makes them trigger happy.

People with Adrenal Fatigue develop chronic fatigue, chronic pain, or both.

If this continues to occur over time, people with Adrenal Fatigue over time will develop chronic pain, chronic fatigue for others, and both for many.

For those with chronic pain, it’s sometimes significant enough to be diagnosed as Fibromyalgia. The official diagnosis is important for research and studies. The diagnosis is also important for insurance and medical coding, so doctors can get paid.

But while the word Fibromyalgia acknowledges your pain, why is it that can’t doctors tell you what this pain is from? A simple diagnosis code doesn’t really speak to the root cause.

Adrenal Fatigue Prolongs the Effects Fibromyalgia

Adrenal Fatigue causes inflammation. Inflammation cause pain. Chronic inflammation also acts as an additional biochemical stress, which perpetuates the entire body’s dysfunction and causes it to over-perceive its environment. This is called “Central Sensitization.”

The effects of Adrenal Fatigue have the body on constant high alert.

Central Sensitization is the phenomenon of an upregulated nervous system and a trigger-happy limbic system that causes the body to be on high alert, all the time. This is easiest to observe in the sensory nerves.

Smells are stronger and possibly irritating. The slamming of a door may feel like an earthquake to them. The phone ringing makes their heart race. They usually react more strongly to supplements and pharmaceuticals. When faced with a decision, they may find it impossible to choose. Their stress-tolerance has bottomed out.

This over-perception also creates hypersensitivity to touch and physical sensations: body-wide, transient, chronic pain, often diagnosed as Fibromyalgia.  

This Is What Adrenal Fatigue With Fibromyalgia Feels Like

So that those who do not suffer from Adrenal Fatigue and Fibromyalgia might understand this, I often will propose a simple exercise for emphasis. I will ask that one considers the last close call he had in a car, getting cut off in traffic, for instance.

Imagine how it must feels to have body-wide pain 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Now I will ask that he feel that response: feel the blood bound into muscles, heart, and lungs; feel eyes dilate; feel the palpitations; feel the sweat, the queasiness, the sense of fear and panic. I will ask that he then continue to hold on to that experience and add to it the aches, pains, and debilitating fatigue of the last bad flu he had.

If he can imagine this, then he can imagine how it is to be an adrenal patient with Fibromyalgia 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Controlling Inflammation and the Pain of Fibromyalgia

To the mainstream medical community, the cause of Fibromyalgia is an enigma. The even bigger mystery is what comprises effective Fibromyalgia treatment.

While there is a long-term solution for this symptom of body-wide pain, there is no quick fix, no simple vitamin or herb that heals it. The pain can go away over time when you address the entire condition of Adrenal Fatigue in a comprehensive way and do not mask it with analgesics for life.

As the whole system settles and becomes less sensitive, you will be in less pain.

By using my Trilateral Approach to healing Adrenal Fatigue and Fibromyalgia, we target the three main parts of the stress response system: the limbic system in the brain, the autonomic nervous system, and the hormones. As these return to their proper function over time, your body’s ability to control inflammation returns. Its ability to heal and repair improves. As the whole system settles and becomes less sensitive, you will be in less pain.

Like my patients, you probably have no greater desire than to be able to return to a fulfilling, pain-free, and active life. I help you do that. For two decades, I have guided thousands of patients to recovery using my Trilateral Approach to healing Adrenal Fatigue.