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Fibromyalgia
Symptoms and Associated Syndromes Pain
The pain of fibromyalgia has no boundaries. Its intensity has no boundaries and its extension is boundless. The condition of pain can be continuous, but it can also vary with regard to the affected part of the body, intensity, duration and frequency, it can occur as a "everything hurts" syndrome or else as wandering pain. Patients describe it as a deep muscular pain, burning, cramp, lancinating pain, as knife-thrust or as a sticking knife. Very often, the pain and the stiffness are worse in the morning, and the groups of muscles which are frequently used are hurting more intensively.
Pain can occur in the mandibular joint and it can increase to the most severe facial neuralgia, (pseudo trigeminal neuralgia, atypical facial neuralgia), toothaches and pain in the maxillary sinus can occur as well. The teeth are frequently extracted and the patient complains of phantom pain on the spots where the teeth were located. The tongue problems and difficulty in swallowing are known as neck-tongue-syndrome.
Other Frequent Symptoms are:
Heart sensations/cardioneurosis with usual ECG, chest pain either behind the breastbone (perhaps combined with gastric reflux) or band-like around the thorax or along the arch of the rib. The latter sensation of pain was known already in antiquity as pain below the rib cartilage, as hypochondria. As the physicians of antiquity also did not understand the causes of this type of pain (because they did not find anything pathologic), this description became a synonym for the malade imaginaire, the hypochondriac. Modern physicians are subject to the same wrong conclusion when they consider fibromyalgia to be a somatoform disorder and therefore search for its cause within the psyche. A more than 2500-year-old misconception still taught nowadays.
Women complain of mastodynia (pain in one or both breasts), lymphatic pain, pain in the groin and genital region, urologic symptoms.Pain in the groin without the presence of groin hernia, football groin, disorder of voiding the bladder, disturbed discharge of urine, irritable bladder, interstitial cystitis, vaginal spasms, anal spasms, menstruation disorders, pain in the course of menstruation, unclear lower abdominal pain of women ("uterus retroflexus", lax ligaments) which often lead to the unnecessary operations to remove the uterus.
Fatigue
This condition is described differently by the patients. Some of them feel physically washed out, while others feel mentally exhausted or a weakness of concentration. Their entire energy has melted like ice and drained away. Some describe a leaden heaviness in their limbs depriving them of all their energy.
Disorder
As a rule, patients fall asleep without difficulty. Their sleep, however, is disturbed, as if the pain would wake them up from their deep level sleep. Sleep apnea occurs frequently, as well as muscular trembling, muscle twitch (night-time jerking of arms and legs).The restless leg syndrome is another aspect of fibromyalgia. The same applies to teeth grinding. The sleep pattern is distinctly different from the pattern found in depressive patients.
Bowel Syndrome
20 – 40% of the patients suffer from abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhea, meteorism and nausea, sometimes the pain seems to come from inside the body and to "hang at the front and at the back of the arch of the rib" (Hypochondria, see above) or to be radiating from the gall-bladder. The Irritable Bowel Syndrome is yet another aspect of fibromyalgia.
Headaches
Painful condition of the back of the head, tinnitus, eyelid oedema, migraine with pain attacks in the forearms during the aura.
Neurological Symptoms
Patients complain of numbness and tingling sensations in the extremities, hypersensitive skin areas, swelling of hands and legs, disturbed skilfulness and gait, while neurologists cannot find any pathological changes, sometimes they find a complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS).