The New York Times published an article on fibromyalgia yesterday titled “Drug Approved. Is Disease Real?” What the article describes is creepy for what it reveals about health care in this country, in particular the warped logic that counts for medical reasoning.
The title is kind of a give away about how the article approaches fibromyalgia as something that’s made up. The article itself is about the first-ever drug approved by the FDA to treat fibromyalgia. The story suggests that the FDA, drug companies, MDs who treat fibromyalgia patients, and even fibromyalgia support groups that get financial support from drug companies are in cahoots in making up the disease. The other side of the story consists of MDs who think fibromyalgia isn’t a disease and that patients are made worse my medical interventions.
There is, of course, a third option: take sufferers at their word and acknowledge that conventional medicine hasn’t got a clue how to deal with it. But I digress. For the moment.
The article discusses how fibromyalgia activists are really happy with the approval of this drug. Not because it will cure them, but because it brings legitimacy to their condition and their cause. A direct connection is drawn to the relationship between increased “recognition” of depression and the introduction of Prozac. In other words, if a drug exists to treat a condition then it must be a real disease. “The day that the FDA approved a drug and we had a public service announcement, my pain became real to people.”
The critics, including an early investigator who defined the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia who now doesn’t think it’s real, cite the newly approved drug’s dismal performance in actually reducing pain, the significant side effects, and the likelihood that it will quickly fail and patients will move on to yet another drug. However, they do expect these new drugs to do one thing very well: make a boatload of money for drug companies. The reason for this is simple. Both critics and proponents agree that once there’s a drug, physicians will be more willing to diagnose someone as having fibromyalgia because there’s a drug they can prescribe.
What about the pain people experience? The critics have two things to say. One is that diagnosed sufferers make themselves sick by having a diagnosis that reinforces that self-conception. “The more they seem to be around the medical establishment, the sicker they get.” Interesting comment, from which I draw a very different conclusion. Before I get to that, the other thing critics say is “Most people manage to get through life with some vicissitudes, but we adapt. People with fibromyalgia do not adapt.” I guess fibromyalgia is, like being gay, a lifestyle choice.
What awful little men.
Here are the problems with conventional medicine illustrated by this sordid tale.
Conventional medicine treats diagnoses not human beings. The job of a real healer is to alleviate the suffering of a specific human being. If that person is in chronic pain, then what the healer should be looking for is its cause and alleviating that. Why? Because pain is nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong. More specifically, chronic pain is your body’s way of telling you that something’s out of balance. A real healer would restore balance not tape shut the mouth of the pain that’s crying out.
Those healers exist. They point in two places: hormone imbalance and the disruption of biochemical processes, disruptions shared by other systemic conditions such as multiple chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue syndrome, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Recovering from fibromyalgia by establishing hormone and nutrient balance is about healing and health, not diagnosis and treatment.
