Fibromyalgia is a real disease – or so says Pfizer in a new television advertising campaign for Lyrica, the first medicine approved to treat the pain condition, whose very existence is questioned by some doctors. For patient advocacy groups and doctors who specialize in fibromyalgia, the Lyrica approval is a milestone. They say they hope Lyrica and two other drugs that may be approved this year will legitimize fibromyalgia, just as Prozac brought depression into the mainstream. But other physicians— including the one who wrote the 1990 paper that defined fibromyalgia but who has since changed his mind — say that the disease does not exist and that Lyrica and the other drugs will be taken by millions of people who do not need them. Advocacy groups and doctors who treat fibromyalgia estimate that 2 to 4 percent of adult Americans, as many as 10 million people, suffer from the disorder. Those figures are sharply disputed by those physicians who do not consider fibromyalgia a medically recognizable illness and who say that diagnosing the condition actually worsens suffering by causing patients to obsess over aches that other people simply tolerate.
To read the entire New York Times article, please click on the following link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/health/14pain.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
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January 31, 2008 at 1:40 pm |
Questions linger? Only for fringe players. Reputable medical professionals who actually treat patients (as opposed to those with some sociopolitical axe to grind) have largely accepted that this is a real illness about which we know too little, admittedly.
The problem is this: pain is by its nature incapable of the type of communication and explanation with which so-called visible symptoms can be communicated to care providers. (See, e.g., Elaine Scarry’s interesting work The Body In Pain) As I explained to others who questioned this article, before my late mother’s cancer recurrence actually showed up on the MRI results, her only symptom was pain. Does that mean that she wasn’t sick at that point? Of course not. Yet this is exactly the same kind of thinking behind the so-called “detractors” of fibromyalgia as a “real” disease.
Talk to just about any pain sufferer, and you’ll hear the same thing: “I know ‘aches and pains’ from this fibro pain and this is NOT that.” It’s been described more akin to the body pain caused by influenza and high fever, only amped up times 10.
Doesn’t sound anything like “aches that other people simply tolerate” as people with the flu typically go see the doctor for some tamiflu,