Fifteen Years and Still Managing Without Meds…Fibromyalgia and Medication

I’ve had fibromyalgia for going on fifteen years now and I still don’t know anything about fibromyalgia medications! I haven’t needed to know…I haven’t taken any.

Now that I think about it, this all sounds hard to believe. But honestly, I haven’t asked my doctor about them, researched them on the internet, asked other fibromyalgia sufferers about them…nothing! I guess I’ve seen the odd TV commercial, extolling the virtues of one drug that supposedly helps fibromyalgia…but that is pretty much the extent of my knowledge on the subject. Truly…if you want to know about fibromyalgia medications…don’t ask me.

I’ve just had no interest in using medications for fibromyalgia so far.

So let me explain.

I’m certainly not against using ongoing medications for fibromyalgia…they may be really helpful for some…and at some point (who knows?) I may decide to look into the possibility…maybe I’m missing out on something…but…so far I haven’t felt I needed them…NOT EVEN CLOSE…I haven’t even considered using medications for my fibromyalgia.

Now, this is truly such a personal issue, and each one of us has to make our own decision on this as to what works for them; obviously there’s no right or wrong way and we each have to chart our own path. And if someone finds medications are helping their quality of life with fibromyalgia, then I say that is great!

But I wanted to talk about it because people are always very surprised (and curious) to find out that I don’t take any medications for fibromyalgia. So I’m thinking, possibly my trial and error experiences over the last decade and a half might shed some light for someone else if they are pondering the question of medication, whether they’re already taking medications to combat fibromyalgia or not.

Now I didn’t necessarily start out this way…there was never a conscious decision initially, to not take medication for fibromyalgia. Again, I definitely don’t have anything against medications and if I felt they would help me I would be taking some. It’s just that, I had always seemed prone to unpleasant side effects of medications. In the past, I’d found that while they helped  me with one issue, they usually created another one for me. So by the time I had fibromyalgia, I had grown pretty wary of medications in general, so, as I talked about in an earlier post, I fairly quickly went into my self-described “combat mode” that had worked so well in helping me live with endometriosis years earlier. In a nutshell, my “combat mode” consisted of “doing anything I could do to feel as healthy as possible in every other way”.

So with this, I decided I would first try just getting healthier and/or making lifestyle changes; I would see how far that got me towards managing my symptoms, before I would think about considering taking any medications. And basically…that’s what I’m still doing…almost fifteen years later!

I’ve managed to achieve and sustain a level of symptoms that I am fine living with, basically through healthy living and lifestyle choices…and still to this day…without medications.  AND…I have steadily, gradually improved over the years…AND I continue to improve.

I said in my recent blog posts that I guess exercise is my main medication of choice…and working out is definitely crucial for me…but it’s also the “combat mode” that I live by that encompasses many lifestyle choices and the “minimizing it” mind-set I have which I described in earlier posts…all of which help keep my symptoms to a level I would consider “irritable” and “difficult” at their worst, and never incapacitating. All of these plus some more that I’ll talk about in future blog posts seem to work together to combat fibromyalgia for me, enough so, that I haven’t felt I needed to start even considering medications.

Have you heard that wise observation that states that we may start something for one reason and continue it because of another? Well, as time went on, another reason for not taking medications became apparent to me. I guess I always instinctively worked on getting at the root of the problem, to try to ultimately get rid of the problem (fibromyalgia!). So, day to day, I was responding to my symptoms in such a way as to try to eliminate the CAUSE of the symptom, which would in turn, eliminate the symptom. For example, if I was getting daily back pain…rather than take medication to feel better…I looked for the cause…maybe I was extra stressed…then I would work on reducing stress…and hence eliminate the back pain altogether.

So if my symptoms flared up, I looked for something to adjust…maybe less stress or more sleep or more exercise or less exercise etc etc…the list goes on… But whatever it was, I NEEDED TO SEE WHAT MY SYMPTOMS WERE AND IF THEY RESPONDED TO WHATEVER I TRIED. When I adjusted something, I needed to see how my symptoms were the next day, and the next, and the next, and so on….because I found that it would take a bit of time for the adjustments to play out in my body and improve the symptoms. So over time I saw what my symptoms were like, day in, day out, in response to all these factors that (over time) I discovered affected my fibromyalgia.

I needed to see how my symptoms responded to basically everything I did. So if I was having a really bad day or week or month or several months…I needed to live through it without medications, to actually see what was happening with the symptoms and how and if they were responding to the changes I was making. In the back pain example, if I was taking medication, I don’t think I’d know if reducing stress that day or maybe taking a nap or even working out would have made a difference and hence I should do more of that to eliminate the back pain altogether.

Without medication I could plainly see what was playing out in my body and how things I was doing or not doing were clearly affecting it; basically I needed to see what was happening with my symptoms to see if what I was doing was working or not.

And as I saw my body react to my lifestyle choices in the form of all these fibromyalgia symptoms, over time I came to see that my body was reacting when I had too much mental stress or not enough sleep etc etc,…so I felt my body was sending me a message…I should cut down on mental stress or get more sleep or whatever. It began to seem to me that taking medications would, in fact, allow me to keep doing the things that were stressing my body. Do you understand what I mean? For example, I could remain mentally stressed and take medication to reduce the resulting symptoms…I would likely feel better from the medication in the short term but my body would STILL have the underlying stress from the mental stress that I had not addressed.

So basically, I came to think (it seemed to me) that perhaps medication would allow me to keep doing the “wrong things” that were stressing my body by providing a band-aid for the resulting symptoms. Which led me to the next thought…what if I keep doing these “wrong things”? I wonder… if they are putting stress on my body…and I find ways to keep doing them instead of addressing them…what then? Will my body break down even further, and then maybe I would have something even worse to deal with?

So I try to heed the warning messages that I feel my fibromyalgia symptoms are sending me. And while taking medications may very well be really helpful for others, I know myself and I know that if I took medications to alleviate my symptoms I would end up overdoing it (even more than I already do at times!).

THE SYMPTOMS TELL ME WHERE TO DRAW THE LINE.

So, yes…I’ll admit I still sometimes push it and cross the line…but I generally know where the line is…and when to (figuratively speaking) “give myself a smack upside the head” and get working to toe the line again.

And I’ve found there’s another aspect I really like about not using medications, but using my own lifestyle choices to manage my symptoms. I feel that if I am controlling the management of my fibromyalgia symptoms through my own (normal healthy) means, it can’t be taken away from me. I don’t have to wo‎rry about something changing with a medication, that it no longer works for me so I have to start experimenting with a new one all over again, or it’s no longer available for reasons beyond my control.

Yes, maybe this is a personal thing, but I definitely like it that, for the most part, I feel as if I KNOW HOW TO and I AM controlling my fibromyalgia myself.

‎Now, do I feel perfect all the time?…NO…far from it at times…and I’ll take the odd acetaminophen or ibuprofen once in a great while…but I always want to be working on the cause of the problem, to try to get rid of the symptoms altogether…I’m aiming to feel good on my own merits. And I usually CAN get rid of the symptoms this way, for a time anyways, until some flare up again and I need to adjust something in my life again.

But overall, in the big fibromyalgia picture, I AM improving from year to year!

Yes, as I said before when recounting my story, “Without medications to help me feel better I have learned how to make myself feel better on my own”. So far I’ve been happy I chose this route…if I wasn’t I could change it at any time.

What I know is real is that fibromyalgia is not easy regardless of what path we take, but we CAN find our own way to have some CONTROL and some POWER over it….I know because I have…and I absolutely believe others can too…like maybe YOU.

 

 

 

 

 

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