Positive Psychology As A Non-pharmacological Treatment For Symptoms Of Fibromyalgia Syndrome

By Author: Henry Ford
Total Articles: 189
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Fibromyalgia Syndrome affects more than six million in the United States of America. According to Jones et al (2002), fibromyalgia syndrome affects 2-4% of the populations in the industrialized countries. Three quarters of the affected individuals are females. This disease is mostly characterized by fatigue, widespread neuromuscular pain, and non restorative sleep as indicated by Patkar et al (2003). The etiology of this disease as put forward by Lemstra et al (2005) is not known with its symptoms varying on daily basis from one patient to the other. Malterud (2000) mentions that, fibromyalgia syndrome is characterized medically unexplained symptoms since currently there are no laboratory tests that confirm symptoms existence. As a result of the elusive symptomology, it has become very difficult to diagnose this disease. This therefore results in patients being transferred to many physicians in the process of seeking treatment. During this process, patients usually become depressed as a result of lack of understanding and often unexplainable conditions they experience. The fact that these people are stressed up they lose meaning ...
... to life. These patients feel that they are not adequately cared for by family members and health care providers. They therefore withdraw from relationships, get depressed, become unconfident, increasingly lose self esteem, and lack sense of self.
Historically, FMS was thought to be a psychiatric disorder, thus FMS patients’ symptoms were attributed as psychosomatic, manifesting from unresolved psychological conflicts (Stahl, 2001). This was the beginning of a long history of the stigmatization of FMS patients (Asbring & Narvanen, 2002). This stigma refers to the belief that FMS existed only in the patient’s mind, and was not an actual medical condition. FMS patients often felt as though the truthfulness and accuracy of their reported physical symptoms were doubted, and were instead ascribed to psychological causes. Caregivers and physicians have both doubted the truthfulness of the patient’s reported symptomology, questioning the patient’s integrity (Asbring & Narvanen, 2002), especially in the absence of positive objective lab tests. Furthermore, Asbring and Narvanen’s (2002) study found that both caregivers and physicians saw FMS as having a psychological cause, thus communicating their thoughts to FMS patients that they were malingering. With FMS not being limited to any specific organ, and being difficult to objectively diagnose, persons with FM have struggled with the stigmatizing aspects of this disorder.
Research has been promising in its continued search for the aetiology of FMS. Promising avenues include researching genetics (Kato et al, 2006) and environmental stressors (McBeth et al, 2007), physical (Buskila et al, 1997) or emotional (Stahl, 2001) injury or trauma, neurotransmitter systems (Clauw & Crofford, 2003), and alterations in the Central Nervous System (Schweinhardt et al., 2008). There is evidence to suggest that FMS patients would benefit greatly from working with a multidisciplinary treatment team who can provide ongoing education of FMS and address the multiple areas of impact upon the patient (Lemstra et al., 2005) to help them cope with the overwhelm of ongoing FMS symptomolgy (Russell, 2002; Werner & Malterud, 2003
Human body is finely tuned in order to adapt to the most serious stresses. With many people, withstanding stress is a normal function and many people try as much as possible to withstand stresses. Stresses are mostly considered as daily aspects as they affect all people daily in one way or the other. It is therefore of great importance for all human being to have a mechanism of withstanding them. However, sometimes stresses become prolonged hence making the human body to over produce stress hormones. It can therefore be indicated that increased stresses make the body to produce as many hormones that help in withstanding stresses as possible. Researches have indicated that if this overproduction of stress hormones continues for a long period of time, there is a high probability that many tissues will be damaged. This usually results to malfunctioning of the human body. There is growing evidence, although it is not yet conclusive, that overproduction of stress hormones resulting to damaging of the body tissues usually results in the body failing to adapt to stresses. This is therefore applied by researchers as one of the aspects that assist in the development of fibromyalgia syndrome. From a general perspective, fibromyalgia syndrome is indicated by warning signs which are gradually followed by increasing symptoms until the development of the full blown expression of the condition. Many people have been affected by this syndrome and around 80% of the patients report that widespread pain is usually heralded by long standing regional or localized pain. It has been reported that fibromyalgia syndrome is very painful and hence very distressing to many patients.
Due to the increasing prevalence of fibromyalgia syndrome in the whole world, there are increasing or growing knowledge that the failure of the human body to process pain as a stress usually results to this condition. This implies that there is imbalance ability to process pain. This imbalance is typically connected to abnormalities in the adrenal glad hormone production and the brain (Affleck et al, 1998). Having said this, it becomes very simple to understand what fibromyalgia syndrome is and what causes it. This is a syndrome that is usually comprised with a number of symptoms and it is characterized by diffuse and chronic body pain. Patients suffering from this syndrome in most cases complain of pain occurring on both sides of the body and mostly in the neck and the trunk (American Pain Society’s (APS), 2005). As indicated, there are a number of symptoms that are associated with fibromyalgia syndrome which include; stiffness, unrefreshing sleep, decreased physical function, poor concentration, difficulties with short term memory, headaches, and fatigue. Researches that have been conducted on this syndrome have estimated that fibromyalgia syndrome usually occurs in 2% of the whole population in the United States of America. Additionally, women are considered as having a higher risk of getting this syndrome (3.4%) as compared to men (0.5%).
The other aspect that has been used in determining the risk nature of this syndrome is age where old people are at higher risk of getting fibromyalgia syndrome as opposed to young ones. Aaron and Buchwald (2001) outline that, approximately 12% of women in the age 60s have fibromyalgia syndrome. It has been indicated by Adams and Sim (2005) that, fibromyalgia syndrome is considered by rheumatologists as the second most common disorder in the United States of America. It is a fact that the cause of fibromyalgia is not well known or understood but the current thinking in the medicine field indicates that abnormalities of the sensory processing with the central nervous system of a human body usually results in the intensification of sensory impulses (Arnold & Keck, 2000). This process which is referred to as central sensitization allows the perception of stimuli as pain despite the fact that it is not normally perceived as pain.
In cases where fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) is very serious and disabling, it is advisable to use a multidisciplinary approach. In this case, pharmacological and non pharmacological treatments of managing pain, functional restoration, and secondary symptoms are all needed (Asbring & Narvanen, 2002). Non pharmacological aspects in treatment should be used in treating all patients. It should be noted that when considering the right treatment method of any disease, it is advisable to go for the one which is most effective and acts fast. Aerobics and strengthening exercises, patient education, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and multidisciplinary therapy have been heavily supported by many strong evidences (Baumstark & Buckelew, 2002). These methods provide worthwhile improvements in pain management and pain related behaviors, self efficacy, overall physical functioning, and coping strategies. While considering these methods as the most useful ways of treating this syndrome, it is of great importance to note that there are some patients who are incapable of performing weight bearing exercises. For such like cases, aquatherapy is considered as a very efficient and effective approach. This is because water exercises usually improve both emotional and physical aspects of fibromyalgia syndrome (Bennett, 2002).

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