What I find most personally satisfying about treating people with fibromyalgia is seeing them get their lives back; from being debilitated with daily pain and fatigue, to seeing pain resolving, so they get their fun back!
Sailing, cooking, sewing, painting whatever floats your boat, our hobbies bring more sparkle to our days. That might seem like an unusual thing to talk about in a post about health, but most of us want more from life than just surviving. And for many with this condition, life can get whittled down the the utmost basics: eat, sleep, work, shop, laundry, email, lather, rinse, repeat . Even work life can get dwindled down.
Many patients have suffered quietly for years before they realized what acupuncture could offer them. In this post, I will share some acupuncture insights on the development and treatment of this condition from my own experience.
Many folks with fibromyalgia did not even get the validation of a fibromyalgia diagnosis from the outset. It’s the ultimate gas-light. Instead they might have been told that there “seems to be no physical cause” of their pain. In other words, it’s psychological, all in your head. These patients have been diagnosed with depression, sometimes even manic depression/bipolar disorder. And that’s not to say that a mental health issue can’t run concurrently with fibro, but it’s unfair to be told that your pain is basically imaginary.
It’s helpful to understand that from an Eastern medicine perspective, any disease that goes on long enough starts to affect all acupuncture channels of the body. We could call this a domino effect. This certainly holds true for the fibro patients I have worked with. This is why my first treatment strategy is to open all 12 main channels. I then combine this with channel points that have a dual function as pain-relieving points.
What I have also seen with this strategy, is that a large percentage of patients start to relax deeply and have an emotional release during these treatments. They shed tears of what might be rage for all the lost time in their lives when there was no relief, or even validation, and tears of renewed hope that they had found a method that works for them. I have had some beautiful moments of bearing witness to these initial releases.
What is often the case for people with fibro and what is often at the root of the imbalance is a parasympathetic nervous system weakness or “low parasympathetic tone”. These patients have lived through incredible stress, and sometimes trauma. Their sympathetic nervous system got locked on overdrive. In other words, it’s like a fight or flight reaction happening for
hours and hours, for days and weeks on end. When the sympathetic system is switched on, the parasympathetic system, also known as the “rest and digest” system is turned off, or dimmed. So we have a very stressed out person that isn’t recovering because they can’t eat or sleep properly. Sheesh!! So this is my second strategy of treatment, balancing the parasympathetic system which is fed by the Pericardium channel, while also regulating the sympathetic system through the Triple Energizer channel, to get it out of overdrive.
When people aren’t resting, sleeping and absorbing nutrients well, it means the repair work that should happen every night during deep sleep is not completed. This means tissues are left un-repaired. When disrepair goes on for long enough, these unhealed tissues cause pain. Added to that, the excess cortisol production from the over-activated stress response, which starts depleting the adrenals. At first there’s too much cortisol being released, causing wake-ups during the night. Then when adrenal burn-out sets in, there’s not enough cortisol. Cortisol is a natural anti-inflammatory and pain reliever, so depleted cortisol from weak adrenals can mean pain is felt more intensely than before. Now there’s lower pain tolerance. And worse, once pain sets in, it’s hard to find a comfortable sleeping position – another cause of lost sleep. Sometimes cortisone shots (steroids) are given but the results of this are temporary (2 months sometimes) and comes with significant side-effects (bone loss).
This is the third part of my fibromyalgia acupuncture strategy, supporting the adrenal-thyroid axis. When the adrenals are fatigued this can create tiredness throughout the day and especially first thing in the morning when we are reaching for coffee and in late afternoon when we crave a salty snack or a nap to keep
going. This fatigue shows up in every fibro patient I have seen. The adrenals system nourishes the thyroid gland so adrenal fatigue can lead to low thyroid. Here you can start to see the domino effect, a cascade of hormone-related symptoms throughout the body. Often I will have to treat both the thyroid and the adrenals to get energy levels back up. These patients can feel tired after an acupuncture treatment and this is entirely normal and expected. This happens because a healing response has been triggered by the acupuncture: the body wants to sleep to complete the tissue repair that got started. This healing process requires rest to complete so the full effects of the acupuncture are often felt after a good night’s sleep, and in some cases a couple of days.
For this reason it’s ideal to get to bed early or by 10-10:30 on the night you’ve had acupuncture so that body can use the prime tissue repair time (11pm – 3am) to get the healing work done.
Healing from fibromyalgia is a long process but it does respond amazingly well to acupuncture. It’s really rewarding to watch people progress in their healing and get their lives back, enjoying their days without having to think about pain.
I look forward to bringing you or someone you love that relief and add sparkle to your days. Call Kingsville Acupuncture now at 519-800-4903.
Warmly,
Cynthia McGilvray, R.Ac.
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