Fibromyalgia: The Answer Is Blowin' in the Wind (continued)

May 1, 2004 - © KEVIN P. WHITE, MD, PhD,

of FM through thoughtful, innovative research.)seem to have made a career out of writing opinion papers chastising FM, while publishing virtually no research at all to support any of their claims. Why? Why do those who belittle the concept of FM offer virtually nothing more of an argument than their own feeble versions of "common sense," while repeatedly ignoring a huge and ever-growing body of evidence supporting its legitimacy?

I cannot answer for those who choose to utilize their positions of influence in this way. Nor can I answer for those who are much less verbal, but who choose to believe the armchair critics while exercising no effort to explore the research literature for themselves. But I believe that soon, the evidence supporting FM will become so insurmountable, so undeniable, that even the most violent FM-beaters will have to relent. The answer is blowing in the wind and soon it will be felt. Technology ultimately will catch up with reality and will prove FM doubters wrong. We will be able to see and measure FM, in the clinical setting, just as relatively recent technological advances now allow us to measure hypothyroidism without goiter and relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, two conditions whose pasts are not entirely unlike fibromyalgia's present.

Hypothyroidism without goiter: how possibly could this have been diagnosed or conceptualized before we could test levels of thyroid function? These women were just middle-aged, overweight, and lazy — or so it was thought. Relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis: until the advent of magnetic resonance imaging and other technologies, these women were dismissed as being psychologically disturbed or malingerers, complaining of odd neurological symptoms like blindness and dizziness and drunken gait, yet appeared virtually neurologically intact on examination.

Let FM not be another tragic example of letting ill-informed, malicious logic derail conscientious, methodical attempts to gradually discover the truth.

To quote Bob Dylan again: "How many ears can one man have before he can hear people cry?".

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