If you have fibromyalgia, you are not Crazy, You are ill!
You may have been told that whatever you have is untreatable or that your symptoms are all in your head. People think you’re a hypochondriac and doctors may not want to handle your case. Or you may have been overmedicated by a prior health care provider who thought he/she could help you. You may be taking medications that make your life miserable. You may be in danger of losing your job and your relationships. You may have fallen victim to those who are making billions of dollars a year off those desperately searching for something, anything, that will help…
When I first started treating fibromyalgia patients many doctors didn’t believe in fibromyalgia. As a result, patients faced a daunting journey at odds with their physicians, and their families. But now that big pharmaceutical companies have discovered how lucrative chronic illnesses are, things have changed. Now everyone “knows” fibromyalgia is real because it’s advertised on television and in magazines. Lyrica, Cymbalta, and Savella sound great until you read the small print or try one and it doesn’t agree with you. Then you realize these “new” drugs don’t actually relieve your symptoms. But they do alter the chemistry of your brain. Not to mention side effects such as weight gain, fatigue, hair loss, headaches and thinning of your bones, as well as ulcers, sores and blisters which can form on your mouth, lips, tongue, hands and feet. If you live in Europe these drugs are not even available because their performance didn’t outweigh their risks in studies.
What’s lost in all this commotion is that none of these expensive drugs will actually treat fibromyalgia. They, and other medications like them, simply change the way your brain perceives your symptoms. Usually their side effects require other medications to counteract them. So here we are in the 21st century, and the average doctor now believes that the accepted regimen for fibromyalgia is actually a balancing act of polypharmacy (multiple drugs), because that’s what the drugs companies claim in their television ads. Meanwhile your illness continues to get worse and eventually require stronger medications as you develop a tolerance to the current medications. To make a bad situation more worse, many fibromyalgia patients are disabled and simply cannot afford expensive medications.
But the truth is that even in the best designed clinical trials the success rate of these drugs was no better, when compared,–not to other drugs–but to sugar pills. And this is why the standard medical treatments for Fibromyalgia don’t work. They are no better then sugar pills. However, they have the big money of the pharmaceutical industry pushing these drugs on television every evening. The pharaceutical companies have drug reps visiting medical doctors on a daily basis, buying them lunch, and pushing this “junk science” on them. So the average medical doctor thinks it must be true. And the poor fibromyalgia patient gets to suffer because they become a lab test subject for the lastest, greatest, miracle drug that the pharmaceutical companies are pushing.
Please don’t let this happen to you, or someone you love. You need to seek out a doctor who understands how to truely treat this condition. You need to seek out a doctor who understands that fibromyalgia has both a metabolic and neurological component, and who knows and understands that specific metabolic treatments must be paired with specific neurological treatments. Dr. Berl Michel, DC of Palm Beach Gardens practices with an emphasis on combining the metabolic treatments with the neurological treatments to help fibromyalgia patients recover.
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