Fibromyalgia is a medical disorder characterized by chronic muscle pain, stiffness, fatigue, and nonrestorative sleep. It is an illness that frustrates many physicians as much as patients. It can be associated with many debilitating symptoms such as irritable bowel, urinary urgency, and headaches. Fibromyalgia is not a new disease, but rather a syndrome, because it is a collection of symptoms without a known cause.
Diagnosing fibromyalgia is based on trigger points in patients. Trigger points or small contraction knots are characterized by tenderness and referred pain, in other words, they hurt when pressed and they send their pain to some other part of the body.
Trigger points cause problems such as earaches, dizziness, nausea, heartburn, false heart pain, heart arrhythmia, tennis elbow, and genital pain. Trigger points are sometimes the cause of sinus pain and congestion. They may play a part in chronic fatigue and lowered resistance to infection. And because trigger points can be responsible for long-term pain and disability that seem to have no means of relief, they can cause depression.
These trigger points are often confused with tender points, one of the official criteria for a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. There are clear guidelines for distinguishing trigger points from tender points:
1) A trigger point needs firm pressure to elicit pain, while a tender point is so painful it can hardly be touched.
(2) Tender points cause only local pain; they don’t refer pain to other sites as trigger points do.
(3) Trigger points are found predictably only in certain places; tender points can occur anywhere and everywhere.
Filed under: fibromyalgia | Tagged: fibromyalgia, tender points, trigger points
