A Quick History of Fibromyalgia

The human body is fraught with the potential for chronic issues that can make life miserable. They can affect specific organs like the heart or lungs, ravage your entire body through diabetes or kidney disease, and, in the case of Alzheimer’s, can even cause the person you are to slip away. Although many of these chronic diseases don’t have a “cure,” they can be managed through combined therapies that reduce their severity to make life much more manageable. However, when it comes to intractable neuropathic pain, there are still many knowledge gaps that need to be filled and countless hours of research done if the millions of people afflicted with this issue worldwide are going to receive the treatment they need.

For whatever reason, the traditional medical community has historically struggled to address fibromyalgia adequately. Whether that’s due to the complex nature of the syndrome, the higher prevalence of occurrence in women, or the fact that it’s just not as visible as other chronic issues, fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) wasn’t even really taken seriously by the medical community at large until the late 20th century. In order to understand why the response to addressing this chronic pain syndrome has been so slow, it’s helpful to look back at how fibromyalgia has changed in the eyes of medical communities across the world.

FMS Over the Ages

For as long as there have been people on the planet, there have been issues with chronic pain. Some experts even go as far as to say that “pain is a constant companion for humanity.” Because of the higher variability and individual nature of chronic pain issues, the field has always been slow-moving. The Western World, in typical fashion, generally turned to substances like opioids and even alcohol for the management of pain, while practices in the East applied a more holistic style of treatment that addressed mental and spiritual aspects of the disease in addition to the purely physical.

At the turn of the 1900s, and for hundreds of years prior, muscle pains and chronic issues with discomfort around the body were housed under the rheumatism classification - referring to any medical issues affecting joints, ligaments, muscles, and bones. It wasn’t until the early 70’s that the foundational research for FMS was conducted. These studies involved the use of medical imaging and identified the multiple trigger points around the body that have become the hallmark of fibromyalgia syndrome. Still, the first controlled study conducted in a clinical setting wasn’t published until the 1980s.

In the decades following these initial studies, there have been important discoveries, like the centralized nature of pain sensitivity and the influence of hormones and neurotransmitters on pain severity, but a “gold standard” of treatment has yet to be discovered. Compounding this lack of standardized treatment is that some professionals continue to view FMS as either an isolated issue, symptom of a larger issue, and, in some cases, as a purely psychological phenomenon.

Recent breakthroughs with the application of hypno, massage, guided meditation, and salt therapies are sparking excitement and renewed interest in the complex interconnected issue of chronic pain and fibromyalgia syndrome.

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