A lot of times the epinephrine, norepinephrine is high. The thyroid story is a very complicated one, and it’s way more complicated than the family doctor, even the internal medicine doc, or even the conventional endocrinologist is willing to talk about and go to with patients even if they understand it. The other stuff, you know, we’ve talked about it sometimes in our algorithm as pseudofibromyalgia. Dr. Hedberg: Is there anything else you’d like to add to the classic and the pseudofibromyalgia story that we haven’t touched on today? I mean, because even just human touch is going to affect a lot of these issues. So, these patients that have classic fibromyalgia, virtually 100% of them have what would meet the diagnostic criteria for irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS, because the same dysfunction going on in the brain is going on in the nervous system of the gut. And then they negotiated how many out of the 18, how to be…you know, had a heightened level of pain response to be positive, and then negotiated it to 11, and yet doctors would take this as the bible like, “Oh. So, Dr. Brady is uniquely passionate not only as a doctor, but also as a patient advocate. But it does take a team. David: Massage therapists, people who touch people, who spend time with people. But it’s observable that females, when they’re put in those difficult situations, when their nervous system is young, its neuroplastic, it’s kind of learning how to behave, learning how to frame up its world, if they’re in that situation they get into this locked pattern of being on guard, if you will. I hurt all over,” and I ask him, “Well, where do you hurt?” and they start pointing to their hips, and their knees, I’m thinking, “Well, that’s not fibromyalgia.” That’s articular. David: Tender points, actually. Currently, there is no cure for Fibromyalgia, so it’s important to have as many strategies up your sleeve for dealing with your symptom as possible. Stress reduction is one of the most important steps for a patient suffering from fibromyalgia to take and which is going to be effective here. I’m certainly not a formally trained mental health professional, but I’m pretty good at picking up things, you know, and noticing things, and mining these things out of people’s histories in a respectful way. And we also need to take a look at the catecholamines, you know, the dopamine, the norepinephrine, epinephrine. It’s good for clinicians to read. We are here to help you manage your pain and give you the relief you need! Exercise frequently. Well, that’s why I put the content out there. They have these trigger points. This is not a musculoskeletal thing. Here are some of the most common medications for fibromyalgia: Home Remedies: We can’t stress self-care enough when it comes to managing fibromyalgia. David: Dr. Hedberg, thanks for having me back. And I looked into a lot of different routes and books, more reasons than we probably have time to go into. I am a Father of 2 wonderful boys and husband to my beautiful wife. It also causes an abnormal increase in certain brain chemicals that signal pain, resulting in pain signals that are stronger than average. But they tend to overprocess things, where, what would be light touch to a normal person or something that’s mildly painful would become very painful, or a light touch would be perceived as pain, even the wind blowing on them, right? And I actually pulled the minutes from the conference where that criteria first came out of. Dr. Hedberg: Well, welcome, everyone, to “The Dr. Hedberg Show.” This is Dr. Hedberg, and I’m really looking forward to the conversation today. We talked about the history of fibromyalgia diagnosis, the causes of fibromyalgia, the difference between “Classic” Fibromyalgia and “Pseudo” Fibromyalgia, treatment strategies, supplements for Fibromyalgia, and much more. It’s just meant to say, “Well, it’s not really this classic fibromyalgia thing. Yeah. Fibromyalgia Diet As A Treatment To Alleviate Fibromyalgia Symptoms, What I Did To Turn My Life & Fibromylagia Around, Treating Fibro With The Power Of Natural Remedies, 250+ Symptoms of Fibromyalgia and Common Co-Existing Conditions, A New Compound Discovery May Calm Chronic & Fibromyalgia Pain, Are We Addicted To Pain? Our last podcast discussed the GI map stool test from Diagnostic Solutions. Who always comes out on top the list? But we talked about really working up thyroid comprehensively. You know, one of the experts said, “We should have 24 points,” and the next one said, “No, we should only do 12,” and then they settled on 18. I think this will really clarify a lot of things for people that are out there who may have it or they might be thinking now, “Maybe I don’t have it. It doesn’t always have to be that overt. But we try to basically take the story to the doctors, into the healthcare providers, so that they would know better and make better referrals and make better treatment decisions. It was often talked about by the presentor or lecturer in sort of a questioning way or almost a condescending way, you know, is this really real? He was a chiropractor then. So, what we need to do is get the serotonin up, drive the substance P down. It works when the drug doesn’t, or it makes the drug work better if you are using the drug and you can use less of it. It’s where they were anchoring, you know, to an insertion point or something. They have anxiety, they can have panic attack, unrefreshed sleep, achy all over, and then the final thing is most of them have profound unrelenting fatigue that is separate and distinct from chronic fatigue syndrome. There’s been even much larger, broader scope observations of these types of things and digging into the literature and doing pretty systematic sort of medical histories on these patients that have been pretty consistent, that this is almost universally a female disorder. So, I urge you to check that out. I hope these articles help in some small way! Mothers who didn’t show a lot of affection or love to the young girl, fathers who they can never please once again, difficult relationships parentally like, you know, the mother and father always fighting, and yelling, and screaming, and going through divorce at critical ages, all those kind of things can really rewire the brain. According to the National Fibromyalgia Association, approximately 10 million Americans suffer from this pain condition—and about 80% of those patients are women. It’s just the way they’re wired, or the way they’ve learned to deal with their world. But beyond that, from a nutriceutical standpoint, there’s a lot of great options. So, you know, we always try to remember the patient has the right to more than one disorder at any given time. I’ve been practicing, you know, it’s getting really close to 30 years and it’s, you know, frightening to say. Dr. Hedberg: Right, right. So, we’re using things like 5-hydroxytryptophan for instance as a precursor to get serotonin up. >. They have myofascial pain syndrome or some other disorder that that therapy is amenable to treating. So, you’re more sensitive to something that’s non-painful being interpreted as painful, for instance. It could be that their neighbor told them they have fibromyalgia, it could be that they went on, you know, Doctor Google, it could be WebMD, it could be that they went to their family physician and got diagnosed, a massage therapist could have diagnosed and more even, a rheumatologist could have diagnosed them. So, there’s a lot of interventional nutrition, dietary and lifestyle medicine changes, botanical medicine, and kind of what we would today call like naturopathic medicine. I had a blow dust off journals. But we started, kind of, getting together on this quest, and over time we became experts ourselves, not only by reading and teaching ourselves but by actually reaching out and meeting the world’s experts in fibromyalgia, and then we went on to, you know, do a lot of publishing, do some research, wrote lot of textbook chapters, things like that. Dr. Hedberg: Exactly. Instead, there are tests done to exclude other diagnosis and which will tell the doctor that this is what the patient is dealing with in return. This information should not be used as a substitute for professional diagnosis and treatment. They have a low central nervous…I’m sorry, cerebrospinal fluid serotonin state. And many of these patients don’t do well on those drugs, just like many anti-depressents don’t do well on those drugs, if they’re not fundamentally making enough serotonin to begin with. Let’s really dig into fibromyalgia. But so many people get put on these things that don’t have fibromyalgia because of lazy diagnosis. So, it’s a really good resource. This is ridiculous. David: And as you know, as good as anybody, Nick, you’ve done some of the best work on this and got some of the best awareness out there for people. First of all, you know, the official diagnostic criteria which is put out by the American College of Rheumatology first in 1990, it has been modified a multitude of times since then, the latest one is sort of a 2016 version of it, which was modified in 2017, is in my, and most of my colleagues who deal with a lot of fibromyalgias, opinion woefully inadequate. Is there any particular event that really got you interested in this condition? Especially if this pain is causing problems in their personal or professional life and chances are that it is, then it is important to allow a person relief of their pain so that they can start living as normal a life as possible. He is in private practice at the Whole Body Medicine in Fairfield, Connecticut. So, I’m looking forward to this. It’s gotten a little better over time, some people arguing, in some way it’s gotten worse, but it’s really prone to overdiagnosis, so it catches way too many people with way too many problems.