Chronic Pain Legacy: The History of Fibromyalgia – Part I

We all know about pain… however, just some of us are “messengers” of a chronicle condition that invites pain to be present in everyone’s life.

Since when FMS have been a presence among world society?

Since when people suffer from the symptoms of that strange disorder?

Throughout history, people have reported illnesses with strikingly similar symptoms pointed in to the straight direction of the FMS “abyss”. Physical pain reports can even be found as far back as the old testament biblical times, but only since the XIX century this disorder has been identified by a variety of names such as hysterical paroxysm, muscular rheumatic fibrositis. The present term fibromyalgia was first coined in 1976, in an effort to describe its primary symptom.

Physicians recognized and wrote about a condition they then called muscular rheumatism and some in the medical profession thought (and may still think) as something of psychological nature. All over time there have been a multitude of theories as to what FMS is and what causes patients complains. Those ones were for a long time ignored as real, once the particular characteristic of this physical suffering remains the invisibility.

As the term of the illness implies, it was logically thought to be a muscle problem, as muscle pain seemed to be the primary symptom. But as research studies could find nothing wrong in the muscles, for a while FMS was theorized as an autoimmune disorder. However, once again, research revealed no disturbance of the immune system.

Turns not so difficult to realize why for most of the past two hundred years FMS was thought to be a psychiatric or psychosomatic disorder.

In 1824, tender points were described by a doctor in Edinburgh and in 1880 another doctor described the same condition and then called it neurasthenia. During 1904 Pathologist Ralph Stockman first reported evidence of inflammatory changes in the fibrous, intra-muscular septa (a thin that divides two soft masses of tissue) on biopsies from patients. In the same year William Gower introduced the term fibrositis in his description of low back pain. Subsequent studies of muscle biopsies have failed to reproduce Stockman’s findings of inflammation and the term fibrositis is therefore considered a misnomer.

In 1913 a physician named Luff talked in the British Medieval Journal about the factors of fibrositis, noticing that the symptoms grew worse when the barometric pressure lowered and rain was approaching. Luff’s article also referred temperature variations, fevers, infections and vehicle accidents, drawing the connection between “growing pains” in children and fibrositis. For the subsequent years terms as fibrositis, fibromyositis, psychogenic, psychosomatic or muscular rheumatism have all been used as description of the syndrome. Yet the term fibrositis has been most resilient and eventually became synonymous with idiopathic local or diffuse muscle-skeletical pain of any type.

To be continued…if you like this article please check back in a couple of days for Part II.

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