Thursday, October 09, 2003

Great, great, great post by my Long Island blog buddy, Robin Dorsty entitled Fibromyalgia And The Medicalization of Docility. It is so well written. It is a must read and really reminds me of Laura Hillenbrand's New Yorker article. You see, I believe that there is a reason I feel the way I do. I think that my illness has a cause. And I believe that someone, somewhere, is eventually going to be able to figure out what it is. And I’d rather spend my time finding that person than waiting around for the medical establishment to start focusing on that, and leave off working so fervently to produce new and better symptom-addressing drugs. That they are not going to do this ought to be made obvious by the fact that Fibromyalgia continues to be placed within the bailiwick of Rheumatology. FMS is neither an inflammatory condition, nor is it an autoimmune one, so what could the rheumatological model possibly contribute to explaining it? Perhaps, for instance, it is a hormonal imbalance -- studies have shown a disrupted HPA axis in sufferers -- but endocrinologists won’t even see Fibromyalgia patients, no less consider the notion that their medical models might have anything to offer. Perhaps there is a viral or bacterial cause, and yet infectious disease specialists never have had anything to say on the subject of FMS. It comes down to this: mysteries are unmasked when the right people start asking questions about them. Who are the right people in the case of Fibromyalgia? I don’t know. But maybe they ought to. 7:50:39 PM    comment []

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