Treatment For Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is one of the buzziest (and most controversial) medical issues of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It has rapidly gone from being an “it’s all in your head” obscure condition to an increasingly diagnosed one. Symptoms include pain and fatigue. Also commonly known as fibromyositis, fibrositis, and myofascial pain syndrome, fibromyalgia is a non-contagious disease that is believed to attack nerve systems in the body. While it has been theorized that everything from emotional stress to viruses are causes of this disease, no “smoking gun” has yet been found.

If the disease is left untreated, it can create chronic pain issues that lead to depression, anxiety, severe fatigue, and in some cases, social isolation. Therapies ranging from medicine to exercise programs to cognitive behavior therapy have been used, although not with consistent results. Not surprisingly, the disorder has no cure.Military veterans are not strangers to this disease. In fact, one of the first and largest clusters of fibromyalgia was reported in the 1990s with a disproportionate number of Gulf War veterans suffering from symptoms of it. As a result, the disease was classified as what the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) calls a “presumed” (it hasn’t been officially proven to exist, but it pretty obviously does) disease. Because of this classification, the VA offers veterans benefits for its sufferers.