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Finding the Cure for Fibromyalgia

by Dr. Marcus Laux

Published 04/22/09

Fibromyalgia, which affects five million Americans, has the conventional medical community completely flummoxed. What most docs try to do, with a stack of harsh prescriptions, is dull your senses so you feel little and care even less; they honestly don’t know what else to offer. But for every year you have fibromyalgia, your brain’s age-related loss of gray matter is almost 10 times greater than in the brain of a healthy person.

Thankfully, brilliant minds who know how to think outside the box have been conducting research on this syndrome, and they’re starting to understand what causes it. Better yet, they’re curing it.

Figuring Out Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia tends to first appear after a significant short-term stressor that’s often, but not always, a physical trauma—especially one to the head or neck. One study showed that 22 percent of people who suffered whiplash in a car accident developed fibromyalgia during the ensuing year. It also commonly occurs after viral infections such as a nasty bout with shingles or the flu. But because it typically doesn’t appear until months after the initial insult, conventional docs usually fail to connect the dots.

Connecting the dots is one thing Martin Pall, PhD, is exceptionally good at. He’s a professor of Biochemistry and Basic Medical Sciences at Washington State University. Pall unearthed what could be the cellular mechanism that drives the whole fibromyalgia scenario. He has gone on to devise a treatment protocol that can dismantle that mechanism, making it possible for your body to push fibromyalgia out of your life for good. Here’s Pall’s new paradigm about how fibromyalgia happens.

When you experience a major stressor, inflammation increases your body’s levels of a molecule called inducible nitric oxide (iNO). In turn, elevated iNO stimulates cytokines that stoke your inflammatory fires. Inflammation is a necessary part of the healing process, but it’s supposed to subside once you’ve healed.

If fibromyalgia has you down, however, your inflammation doesn’t subside. Instead, the short-term spike in iNO during the most painful phase of your trauma starts a self-perpetuating biochemical loop that keeps the iNO coming and keeps your pain and inflammation churning. When that happens, you’re stuck, unable—possibly for the rest of your life—to escape the pain unless you get real help. By addressing only your symptoms, conventional medicine compounds your pain with the side effects of prescribed antidepressants, anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxants, anticonvulsants, sedatives, tranquilizers, and sleeping pills.

To make matters worse, fibromyalgia not only generates its own pain, but also makes “everyday” pain excruciating. That’s because iNO decreases blood flow in your thalamus—an almond-shaped organ at the base of your brain that processes sensory input. Your thalamus contains neurons whose job is to inhibit the propagation of pain. With less blood supply, your thalamus malfunctions, and pain not only continues, it becomes disproportionately intense.

The result is hyperalgesia—that is, a lower pain threshold and a heightening of how much it hurts. This makes even minor bumps and scratches, which others might barely notice, feel like major injuries. A woman who’s suffered a lifetime of monthly menstrual cramps and given birth to five children knows a thing or two about pain, but fibromyalgia can bring her to tears with a simple stubbed toe. (It’s worth noting that 90 percent of those with fibromyalgia are women.)

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