The 7 Fibromyalgia Treatment Mistakes You MUST Avoid…
A Patients Guide To Avoiding The Common Traps You Will Encounter When Looking For
A Solution To Your Fibromyalgia
You’ve been diagnosed with fibromyalgia so NOW WHAT? Your body aches… your fatigued and tired… you can’t sleep, your body goes through periods of constipation and diarrhea, and your head feels ‘fuzzy’.
As you seek answers and solutions to bring your body back to where it should be… where it once was… here are 7 common mistakes that patients and doctors make that result in YOU, as the patient, suffering more and longer, and there is no reason for you to suffer at all. Hopefully this Guide will serve as a valuable resource that will help you avoid these mistakes, and get the information and help you deserve.
Accepting ‘Fibromyalgia’ As The Label For All Of Your Symptoms.
The truth is… your body is sick. What commonly happens is that when no simple explanation can be found for your symptoms you get labeled with fibromyalgia. When you first got diagnosed you may have been happy to finally have something to call it, a name to refer to your symptoms by. It’s scary having symptoms that nobody can explain. It leaves you with angst and worry. Your mind wonders if there is some underlying process that is more serious, and when you finally get that fibromyalgia label you let out a sigh of relief.
Soon you probably realized that this fibromyalgia label did not lead to a straight forward treatment or solution.
A diagnosis that gives a set of symptoms a name, but does not lead to a solution is not helpful. If you are not careful every single new symptom you have will be attributed to your ‘fibromyalgia’ and therefore not explored properly. You need a doctor who will be explore all of the specifics of how your body is truly functioning, from a big picture, functional approach.
So if you have already been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, then don’t get stuck in that trap where everything is now ‘fibromyalgia.’ You still deserve to be cared for, taken seriously, and respected. Don’t let that diagnosis be the excuse for doctors to just brush everything off, and stop looking for answers.
Falsely Believing That All Of The ‘Correct’ Tests Have Been Done, And That Everything On Your Lab Reports Is ‘Normal’.
This is a huge trap fibromyalgia patients fall into, that you absolutely must avoid. Where our Institute is located in Central California, many local fibromyalgia patients have traveled to one of the big diagnostic clinics such as Stanford Medical, Sansum Clinic, or UCLA Medical. They go there, spend a couple days doing tests, and then come out with the same thing they had before: a report that says that the labs are ‘normal’ and a diagnosis of fibromyalgia.
Then the patient is satisfied, feeling that EVERYTHING has been done, and they continue on the path of taking medications or just living with the pain, fatigue, and the rest of the symptoms that go along with it.
The truth is zero functional testing has been done. They may have ran MRI’s and didn’t see obvious abnormalities, they ran the basic blood work and it didn’t appear to be abnormal, and they call it a day. If you accept that everything has been done, then you have lost at that point because you will stop searching for answers and information that will help you. You may never make it to a doctor who does functional testing, and will look at functional ranges, and put all of the pieces together for you.
Relying Solely On Medications To Manage The Symptoms.
Ask yourself if you really think that Lyrica, Neurontin, Savella, Vicoden, or Cymbalta is actually making your body more functional or healthy? Is it fixing anything?
The answer is an astounding NO. It is covering up some symptoms, and in the process creating side effects that in the long run may be worse than your original set of symptoms.
What about medicine habituation? What is habituation you ask… it is your bodies tendency to develop resistance to a medication. So what used to only take one pill now takes 3 pills to get the same effect.
Plus if you rely on only the medication to try to feel better then the day is going to come, like so many that I have seen, that had their medications just flat out stop working. All of a sudden the symptoms are back, and they are 10X worse. The patient goes scrambling to look for a simple answer… and it doesn’t exist. The body that was sick is even sicker now, and it is really sad to see someone suffer like that.
They could have been working on the cause of their problem, healing, reversing their fibromyalgia symptoms, while they still had the medication if they needed it. Instead they just relied on the medication and their situation can take a turn for the worse really fast.
Going Through Treatments That Are Hyper-Focused On Each Individual Symptom.
If you were diagnosed with fibromyalgia more than a year ago, then it is likely that you have already experienced this. As part of your symptoms you may have achy shoulder pain for example. So your doctor sends you to physical therapy for your shoulder… thinking that the source of the problem is in the shoulder. Most likely the physical therapy did very little, if anything to help the shoulder.
The next symptom is maybe insomnia, an inability to sleep. You get sent to a sleep specialist to do sleep studies. They may give you a night time breathing devise, or give you sleeping pills. Again this is treatment that is aimed at a particular symptom, and is totally ignoring the fact that there is something more… something more connected going on inside your body… and this approach will not create true and lasting change or healing for you.
Avoid falling into this symptom treatment trap, and find a doctor who will take a WHOLE person approach. Fibromyalgia is a functional breakdown in multiple body systems, and until someone is willing to take a step back, and look at everything, all at once, you are going to suffer at the hands of ineffective treatments.
Not Taking Your Health Care Into Your Own Hands.
We are trained in our society to believe that doctors know best, and that when we go to a doctor we are getting the best care. It’s true, doctors are doctors because they care about people. They want to help them, you included. But doctors now function in a health care model designed to treat emergencies and simple, straight forward, conditions.
With something as complex as fibromyalgia syndrome, you have to grab the bull by the horns and take charge. It’s your life… your body… that is at stake. It is a question of will you accept the status quo, and get pushed through the system, getting pills, disrespected, and mistreated, or are you going to empower yourself, find answers and information that is going to help you reverse this condition once and for all.
It’s up to you. Nobody is going to care about You more than you YOU will. Today is the day… seize the day… take action… you deserve to feel well, and if you don’t believe it, then nobody else is either. They will let you continue on, accepting a label that consigns you to a life of pain.
Doing Nothing And Thinking It Will Not Get Worse.
A common myth, perpetuated by many sources, is that fibromyalgia does not get worse… you have nothing to worry about. This is just not true. Studies have shown that fibromyalgia patients have greater than normal grey matter loss in the brain, and this loss of brain material gets worse the longer you have been diagnosed. This links into the brain and neurological piece of this puzzle.
If you sit around and wait for this to just go away on its own, or you just think you can do nothing and it will be OK… you are falling into a trap. Avoid it at all costs. The functional abnormalities are only getting worse, and you are making your recovery harder.
Not Finding A Doctor Who Treats You As A Whole Person and Has A Complete Functional Approach
All of the other 6 Fibromyalgia Treatment Traps, revolve around the Fact that fibromyalgia is:
A Functional problem that cannot be treated like a simple infection, broken arm, or disease. There is something wrong in your body, likely multiple functional shifts, that can be found, and reversed, if the proper testing and treatment are done.
Can be reversed if the doctor takes a step back and looks at the big picture.
And finally if you you don’t take control and find a doctor who is going to put the pieces together for you, then you will continue to get the same treatment, and same poor results.
Now that you are armed with this knowledge , you can find out if the practitioner you see is considering the functional connections between the immune system, hormone system, neurological system, metabolic system, and gastrointestinal system, and whether they are running functional tests to tie it all together.
At the end of the day you want a FUNCTIONAL DIAGNOSIS, you don’t want a label that just describes your symptoms but doesn’t describe WHY you have those symptoms. You owe it to yourself to work with a doctor who is going to do that for you.
Fibromyalgia as it is defined… as a group of symptoms with no known cause, cannot be cured, because how can you cure something that cannot be defined? But when you break it down to a functional diagnosis then Fibromyalgia Can Be Reversed.
At the Boydston Institute, we are known world-wide for our work with fibromyalgia. Our institute was designed to avoid all of these treatment traps, and help fibromyalgia patients reverse their fibromyalgia. We accept limited numbers of patients into our program each month because we are so thorough we must ensure that each patient gets the attention that is required.
To learn more about how to apply to our Neuro-Metabolic Solutions Program, CLICK HERE.
