This updated March of this year may also be of interest,
https://www.painscience.com/articles/fibromyalgia.php
An excerpt:
Quote:
Types of pain and where fibromyalgia fits in (or doesn’t)
There are two main categories of pain: nociceptive and neuropathic. Fibromyalgia doesn’t seem to fit well into either. The most familiar kind of pain is nociceptive, caused by damage to tissues and reported to the brain for assessment. When the reporting system itself is damaged — a pinched nerve, say — you get neuropathic pain.
Two kinds of damage, two kinds of pain.
Fibromyalgia is something else, a third category, a dysfunction. It involves no confirmed damage to the nervous system, just its apparent misbehaviour, and so it’s not welcome at the neuropathy club. It was before 2011! But the definition of neuropathy changed to officially exclude anything that didn’t involve a known lesion.12
Maybe there are unknown lesions? Maybe someday we’ll know that fibromyalgia is caused by some kind of subtle damage to the nervous system.13 There are at least two theories about subtle lesions of this type.14 That would make it just another neuropathy after all, ho hum.
But for now it’s still more plausible that it’s a dysfunction, arising from widespread problems in a complex system, probably at least partially heritable,15 and so no definite and specific point of failure will ever be discovered.1617 But who knows. Science is not finished with fibromyalgia. Hell, it’s hardly begun.
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"There are a thousand things that can happen when you go light a rocket engine, and only one of them is good."
Tom Mueller of SpaceX, in Air and Space, Jan. 2011
10 Apr 2021, 1:02 am
