Introduction

Fibromyalgia can make you feel miserable. Fortunately there are treatments that can reduce pain and help you get on with life.

We've brought together the best research about fibromyalgia and weighed up the evidence about how to treat it. You can use our information to talk to your doctor and decide which treatments are best for you.

Everyone gets aches and pains at times. But if you have fibromyalgia, you have widespread pain across your body, most of the time. It may be bad enough to stop you getting on with your life, and can make you feel miserable.

Doctors are not sure exactly what causes fibromyalgia. But they think it’s to do with the way your nervous system deals with pain.

There are treatments that can reduce your pain, and help you get on with life. Fibromyalgia is usually a long-term condition. But most people with fibromyalgia find their pain gets better over time.

Key points for people with fibromyalgia

• Fibromyalgia means you have pain across your body, including your arms and legs, lasting for three months or more.

• People with fibromyalgia usually feel very tired and may have other illnesses as well.

• The pain may not respond to normal painkillers. But some other types of drugs can be helpful.

• Non-drug treatments, including talking treatments and exercise therapy, can help some people.

• Some people find a combination of different types of treatments works best.

What's normal pain?

It’s normal to have pain from time to time. When you have pain from an injury - for example, from accidentally hitting your thumb with a hammer - the nerves in your thumb send pain messages to your brain. The brain makes sense of these messages, deciding how important they are and what to do about them. The way your brain deals with pain messages affects how much pain you feel, and for how long.^[1]

Usually, the pain dies away a short time after the injury, when the damaged tissue has healed. If the injury causes longer-term damage (for example, broken bones or torn muscles), the pain will also last longer. That sort of pain can protect you. Pain prevents you from walking on a broken leg and damaging it further.

People also tend to feel pain when their body is fighting an infection. That’s because the part of the body affected is inflamed.

When the body has got rid of the bacteria or virus causing the infection, the inflammation goes and so does the pain.

What goes wrong in fibromyalgia pain?

We don’t know exactly what goes wrong to cause the long-term pain of fibromyalgia. But research suggests it happens because of a problem with the spinal cord and brain, not with the muscles where you feel the pain.^[1]