What Your Doctor Doesn't Know about Fibromyalgia: Why Doctors Can't or Won't Treat Chronic Pain

by Linda Meilink, MD Patrick Rhoades

FMS, a common term for fibromyalgia, attacks men, women, and even children of all ages, varying in intensity from patient to patient. Because doctors do not like to treat conditions they don't understand, patients are often ignored, denied pain relief, shuttled off to other "experts," or filled with powerful prescription drugs that may add new and confusing symptoms. Thus begins a vicious cycle of frustrating doctor appointments with no clear diagnoses and continuing treatments that may or may not lead to any relief. If you've always trusted that most of your doctors are up-to-date, informed, and rarely mistaken about a diagnosis or treatment, What Your Doctor Doesn't Know about Fibromyalgia may change your mind. Fibromyalgia is listed as one of the top ten most painful conditions in medicine, but many doctors still do not "believe" in it. If they do recognize it, they have only a vague notion of a collection of mild symptoms that they attribute to stress, menstrual problems, weight gain, depression, or hysteria-none of which have been scientifically linked to fibromyalgia. What Your Doctor Doesn't Know about Fibromyalgia will help you take charge of your condition and teach you how to find physicians you can trust so that you can obtain the relief you need.

Genres: Nonfiction, Health

216 pages, Paperback

First published November 23, 2009

Reviews

[Perry Lake · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is insightful and informative about the mysterious ailment known as fibromyalgia. No one knows what causes it, and the medical establishment is guessing how to treat it.

This is one woman describing her own experience and her feelings about the treatment she received. Linda Meilink tells what she’s gone through and what she tried. And she tried everything.

There’s no happy ending where in the last chapter the author finally finds that miracle cure or the means to cope. Meilink's odyssey from diagnosis to quack treatment and ridicule is nightmarish and the only greater nightmare is how first the disease and then the medicines made her life a Hell.

Maybe because I do not suffer from fibromyalgia, I would have wanted to begin the book with a definition or explanation of the disease. That does comes later, when Meilink explains to those who have never had FMS, that it feels like rigor mortis but you’re still alive. Maybe the most dramatic (and yet still informative) place to start would be the tale of the woman at the yard sale. Other parts in this book read like a horror story that becomes real.

But it’s not all depressing. There’s humor and a great deal of sound advice for improving one’s life even if the chronic pain remains. Maybe the most important message is, try everything; if it works, stick with it.

[Lizz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has some good information, but nothing more than what good common sense gives one. It simply gave me some justification for the ideas and conclusions that I had already thought about the illness.

[Shari Hummel]

I was so comforted by this book. The author new everything that I have been going thru for years. There is no cure in this book. No empty promises. Just an account of one sufferer and advice about certain meds. I will read it again.