Fibromyalgia pain relief is one of the most sought-after of search terms on the web, and no wonder: only recently has medical established seriously entertained the possibility that a real physical basis for the disorder even exists. And no wonder, too, that fibromyalgia pain relief should be so hard to come by, for no imaging scans can capture evidence of muscle or bone being affected, for all the pain reported by its sufferers.
This double-whammy continues to bedevil those who study it as well as those who suffer, for science is based on being able to quantify events, but modern technology has only just begun to pick up on the physical basis of fibromyalgia in the first place.
Still, hope does exist for fibromyalgia pain relief, even within the medical establishment, for scientists now believe that the disease might well be related to cerebral pain processing – or the misprocessing thereof, to be exact. French researchers have reported that Single Positron Emission Computed Tomogrpahy, or SPECT, imaging has picked up vastly different amounts of blood flow to the brain between fibromyalgia sufferers and non-sufferers.
In sufferers, SPECT scans revealed that the places of their brains that would normally be responsible for processing emotional responses to pain had markedly far lower levels of activity. At the same time, SPECT technology discovered that the places of the brain charged with discriminating degrees of pain exhibited far higher amounts of activity!
This is a hopeful development in fibromyalgia study, and SPECT is expected to continue playing a leading role. In the meantime, however the United States Food and Drug Administration has approved the first prescription pain medication for the condition, and there are creams and gels obtainable on the marketplace which some sufferers swear by. Interestingly, Oregon Health Sciences University staff has discovered that big doses of human growth hormone helped to raise the energy levels of sufferers.