Fibromyalgia Treatments Remedies and Cures

Lynda, a 48-year-old mother of three who lives in upstate New York, got a diagnosis of fibromyalgia in 2000. While there could be prescription medications for fibromyalgia, she's found one unconventional drug -- marijuana -- that certainly does the trick.

I could use [marijuana] when the burning pains started down my spine or my right arm, and soon after, I found I could continue with housework and In fact get more done," says Lynda.

Fibromyalgia is notoriously unpleasant to treat and only 35 percent - 40 percent of people with the chronic pain problem get relief from the available medical drugs. Although there were strong opinions surrounding its use, many sufferers were trying marijuana -- legally or illegally -- and finding it may be help fibromyalgia pain.

"My sufferers are asking me all the time about it," says Stuart Silverman, M.D., a rheumatologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. "Historically and anecdotally, marijuana has been used as a painkiller."

Why marijuana sometimes helps

Our bodies in the most natural way make pain relievers called endorphins, but they also make other substances that may be trigger pain easing in the so-called endocannabinoid system. This system seems to play a main role in many processes in the body, including modulating You may wonder how we feel pain. Marijuana contains cannabinoids very similar to those that occur in the body with a very natural methodology.

Fibromyalgia sufferers typically experience bodywide pain, but they must often take multiple drugs for other manifestations, which can include difficulty sleeping, restless legs syndrome, depression, and anxiety. However, marijuana will treat multiple manifestations, and certain those being treated are seeing results.

It seems rational -- why shouldn't fibromyalgia sufferers try marijuana for their manifestations, if they live in a state where medical marijuana is legal?

But there could be two problems with herbal cannabis, Silverman and other critics say: It's a complex natural substance that contains about 60 varying compounds with potentially medicinal effects, some of which will work with with one another. The other challenge is that the amount of these various compounds will vary by batch, as marijuana is not synthesized but grown.

While Silverman says he has great hopes that synthetic medications based on individual compounds in cannabis may one day help fibromyalgia sufferers (after appropriate randomized controlled clinical trials have been done), he argues that the real thing TODAY is just too inconsistent.

"We think that there's probably a role for that class of compounds, the cannabinoids in general, and it's just a question of working out In what way that's going to be put into practice," says Mark Ware, M.D., an assistant professor in family medicine and anesthesia at McGill University, in Montreal, and the executive director of the Canadian Consortium for the Investigation of Cannabinoids.