Fibromyalgia recovery routines

21/06/2024

💚 No need to hurry
💚 no need to worry
💚 It’s Midsummer’s eve
💚 and I hope you got time to breathe

Happy Midsummer
Liisa

24/05/2024

FIBROMYALGIA – ASSOCIATED WITH REDUCED PHYSICAL PERFORMANCE
👉 Women suffering from fibromyalgia have been found to have gait disturbances that reduce their opportunities for physical activity.*
👉 FM patients walked more slowly, with a shorter step length and a lower step frequency.**
👉 Women with FM had reduced static force output: 20-% lower knee extensor force. 36-% lower elbow flexion strength, 34% lower hand grip strength and additionally 16-% worse walking ability compared to healthy controls. All measures of physical capacity showed a significant relationship with the duration of symptoms.***
👉 Muscle thickness, strength and performance are reduced in FMS patients. ****

ALTHOUGH
👉 Over the past decade, research has shown that physical exercise is an effective treatment for fibromyalgia patients. Strengthening exercises should be included in the treatment of FMS patients.*****

IN MOST CASES, IT'S HOW YOU PRACTICE THAT DETERMINES THE OUTCOME
👉 When you start rehabilitation, it is necessary to take into account how to increase physical performance. When the body starts to function more normally, you will also benefit from those sports that are not suitable at first.

👉 For example, a walking disorder is not cured by walking more, but by correcting the reason why the ability of walking is disturbed. One important reason is the reduced ability to generate energy, which can be corrected with the right kind of exercise.

👉 If you need practical instructions for rehabilitation, you will get them soon, when the rehabilitator's guidebook comes out!
👉 If you want to get more information about fibromyalgia, follow this page!

Liisa
fibromyalgia.fi
*Association of Moderate-to-Vigorous Physical Activity, Sedentary Time, Fat Percentage, and Physical Fitness with Gait Parameters in Women with Fibromyalgia
** Individuals with fibromyalgia have a different gait pattern and a reduced walk functional capacity: a systematic review with meta-analysis
***Controlled, cross-sectional, multi-center study of physical capacity and associated factors in women with fibromyalgia
****Ultrasonographic evaluation of muscle thickness in female patients with fibromyalgia and its relationship with clinical parameters
*****Does Pain Acceptance Contribute to Improved Functionality through Walking in Women with Fibromyalgia?

Fibromyalgia recovery method helps you find routines that fit your life and help you recover from fib

15/04/2024

FIBROMYALGIA - INHERITED FATIGUE 🧬
For some patients, exhaustion is a symptom worse than pain. It was the same for me. On good days, exhaustion meant struggling. I learned to hate being asked to do something. What for others and myself today is normal movement in everyday chores, always required an extra effort.

On bad days, the exhaustion was so strong that you had to just lie down and try to gather strength for the next day. Then the exhaustion was accompanied by a bruised and stiff feeling and often also porridge in the brain - brain fog.

INHERITABLE EXHAUSTION❓
When the mother or a family member of the mother has been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, the child has an increased risk of developing fibromyalgia and inheriting a gene mutation that affects energy metabolism.

👉 The mutation is in the DNA of the cell's energy factory, the mitochondrion, and is always inherited from the mother.
👉 This research result* gives reason to think that for those whose disease runs in the mother's family and the most severe symptom is exhaustion and brain fog, the root cause of exhaustion and brain fog stems from the weakened ability to generate energy due to that gene mutation.

HOW CAN YOU BENEFIT FROM THIS INFORMATION❓
Even if genetics is the root cause of some fibromyalgia symptoms, that doesn't mean you can't do anything about it. It just means that it has to be taken into account in the means of rehabilitation and later, so that the situation does not reoccur.

For those suffering from fibromyalgia, who have that genetic mutation inherited from their mother, even a small amount of physical exertion can eventually lead to exhaustion and not encourage more exercise. On the other hand, lack of exercise leads to an even worse situation.

In independent rehabilitation, that exercise-related problem is solved in such a way that:
👉 Exercise is increased taking into account the total strain
👉 Exercise and movements do not trigger "acidification"
👉 Time is used for active recovery

With the right kind of exercise, you can promote the body's ability to generate energy. In my own rehabilitation, it was a decisive factor and started a chain that eventually led to the absence of symptoms, except for dry eyes.

*A genetic polymorphism that is associated with mitochondrial energy metabolism increases risk of fibromyalgia

Liisa
fibromyalgia.fi

Fibromyalgia recovery method helps you find routines that fit your life and help you recover from fib

05/04/2024

FIBROMYALGIA STORY “I didn't know anything about the risks but I got tired of being a wreck” 📬
It started with hand and feet pain. Strange burning and stabbing pains that came out of nowhere. Later the pain began to jump from one place to another and knee ache could suddenly turn into a wrist or elbow pain. It found new places in my body and my muscle strength gradually diminished.

👉 At first, there were also symptom-free periods, but they gradually shortened. Year by year the quality of sleep deteriorated. There were nights I wasn’t able to sleep at all and I had to go to the toilet many times before my bladder calmed down. After such a night, my whole body felt like a wreck. I felt dizzy and my head was filled with brain fog.

👉 The weather seemed to aggravate my symptoms and the variety of symptoms increased. The lights, sounds, odors and drafts of air became difficult to bear. I began to have trouble with my eyesight and pain in my eyes. I had toothache for which no cause was found and difficulties to produce speech for longer time. It was tricky because of my job. Walking had become very heavy, the grip strength of the hands disappeared and other physical performance was poor. Of course, all of this also had consequences for the mental side.

WHEN I GOT THE DIAGNOSIS, I sometimes wondered if I had any fibromyalgia since I had no symptoms. After fifteen years of illness, there was no doubt about it anymore. There was no more asymptomatic time. Two doctors suspected Sjögren's syndrome, which is typical fibromyalgia comorbidity. The last drops were the CFS type collapses, when I had no strength at all. At that point, I felt that something had to be tried.

👉 Fibromyalgia was found to be a progressive illness in a 16 -year, extensive follow -up study*. Can it get just as bad for everyone? I don't think so, but there is no way to know how bad it gets in your case. Such a risk may seem so distant that it is difficult to take it seriously, but at least now you know.

👉 At that time, I didn't know that fibromyalgia was a progressive illness. Most of fibromyalgia sufferers don't know it even now. The worsening condition was the reason that made me look for ways to stop the bad progress. I thought something had to be done because otherwise my future would look really heavy. And I did. As a result of that I've been asymptomatic for ten years. By asymptomatic, I mean that the body works normally. And I know, that of course, I'm not the only one for whom this is possible.

👉 Scientific research confirms my experience and also the fact that relief from symptoms or absence of symptoms is possible for a large part of those affected. I have written two guidebooks in Finnish based on scientific studies to help self-employed rehabilitators. A translation which is a combination of these two books will be completed soon. If you are interested, you may want to click to become a follower of this page.

* A total of 2,529 FM patients with 79,570 observations or clinical visits were evaluated…between January 1999 and February 2015

Liisa

Fibromyalgia recovery method helps you find routines that fit your life and help you recover from fib

28/03/2024

I hope that you have time for yourself during the holidays and I wish you a peaceful and bright Easter 💛💚

Liisa

21/03/2024

PAIN IS NOT THE ONLY SYMPTOM OF FIBROMYALGIA
Fibromyalgia is mainly known as a pain disease, and many fibromyalgia sufferers agree with that. This perception is based partly on fibromyalgia’s history. In the absence of more detailed testing methods, it was difficult to understand what kind of illness fibromyalgia really is. Partly this interpretation is based on a fact that nobody is telling you what symptoms can be related to fibromyalgia.

READ THE LATEST RESEARCHES 💁‍♀️
Then you know that fibromyalgia is about much more than pain. More and more studies define fibromyalgia as a body dysfunction, where symptoms can be grouped, for example, according to different fields of special health care. Or you can group them as physical, cognitive and mental.

👉 PHYSICAL DISORDERS such as pain, weak performance, clumsiness, balance disorders, indigestion disorders, inflammation, increased risk to autoimmune diseases, hearing loss, visual disorders, slow metabolism and inability to form energy.

👉 COGNITIVE DISORDERS such as memory disorders, poor concentration, difficulties and slowness to perform thinking tasks, difficulty planning things and implementing plans.

👉 MENTAL DISORDERS such as depression, anxiety, stress sensitivity.

RELIEF TO SYMPTOMS OR ASYMPTOMATIC 💁‍♀️
When fibromyalgia bursts, the body tolerates less different kind of loads than usual. With loads I mean exactly the same kind of things that make people sick in general. These include, for example, stress, too much or too little physical exertion, inappropriate diet, poor sleep or a difficult life situation. But you should note also this: the less tolerance you have for different kind of strains, the more changes there will occur in your body functions and it leads to even worse load tolerance. So it kind of feeds itself and therefore fibromyalgia progresses.

👉 In what way is this all related to getting rid of fibromyalgia symptoms? Well, in a way that if you look at what adds to or exacerbates the symptoms, most are such as you can do something about. Like mental and physical load, exercising, eating habits etc.

Liisa – symptom free for 10 years now
👉 Translation of Rehabilitation routines book still in progress

Fibromyalgia recovery method helps you find routines that fit your life and help you recover from fib

23/02/2024

WHILE FIBROMYALGIA PROGRESSES FATIGUE GETS WORSE
When you try to cope with the burdens of everyday life even when your don't have strength to do that, you cause more stress on an already overloaded body. Guess what follows? Gradually more and more difficult everyday life and more stress and symptoms.

Although exhaustion and weakness are strongly related to the inability to generate enough energy, it’s not that simple. It is also affected by, f.ex., the lack of neurotransmitters and the nervous system functioning in an abnormal way.

👉 In the -Neurological Signs and Symptoms in Fibromyalgia- study, this was stated: "Poor balance, coordination, tingling, weakness in the arms and legs, and numbness in any part of the body".

WHAT CAUSES THAT❓
In the background there is again the entity that maintains the other symptoms of fibromyalgia. Those bad self-feeding cycles that cause changes in the body's functions. A little more concrete reasons:

👉 The amount of total physical exertion
👉 Nutrition
👉 Blood circulation
👉 Oxygen supply
👉 The condition of the digestive system

GET RID OF EXHAUSTION❓
Exhaustion is a difficult symptom because when you suffer from it, making changes feels heavy even as a thought. It's a surprise to many that by doing the right things, you don't burden yourself more, but your strength starts to recover. It was a surprise to me at the time too. My strength started to increase right from the beginning and in physical performance I noticed it soon in walking. My walking started to look and feel normal instead of the powerless effort it had become as my performance waned.

Liisa
fibromyalgia.fi

Fibromyalgia recovery method helps you find routines that fit your life and help you recover from fib

09/02/2024

CONDITIONS FAVORING FIBROMYALGIA
You can get fibromyalgia if you are prone to it. That alone does not make you sick, but the disease only breaks out when there are favorable conditions for it. This applies to several other chronic diseases.

UNDER FAVORABLE CIRCUMSTANCES IT IS ABLE TO CAUSE MORE DAMAGE
Fibromyalgia is a progressive disease. If the conditions that triggered the disease do not change for the better in any way, fibromyalgia can progress. What could such conditions be? According to research, for example these:

👉 Prolonged stress
👉 Unprocessed trauma
👉 Too much physical exertion/exercise
👉 Too little physical exertion/exercise
👉 Wrong type of physical exertion/exercise
👉 Poorly functioning digestion and intestinal problems
👉 Deficient or otherwise wrong diet
👉 A constant recovery gap
👉 Long-lasting sleep disorder
👉 Other disease with poor treatment balance

It is individual how much of this type of conditions the body and mind can withstand. That's why also someone who seems to lead a very healthy life can get fibromyalgia.

CHANGE CIRCUMSTANCES, STOP PROGRESS ⛔️
When you look at that list, there is only another disease with a bad treatment balance, which you cannot necessarily influence in any way. You can for everything else. In practice, self-rehabilitation is exactly that, changing conditions unfavorable to fibromyalgia and favorable to health.

NEW RESEARCH METHODS
As more and more extraordinary values were revealed with new research methods, it was understood that fibromyalgia as a disease means that the body works in an abnormal way. So this is a disease that causes the body to function abnormally. When it has also begun to be understood what causes the body to function abnormally, it has been discovered that the symptoms of fibromyalgia can be controlled or get completely rid of.

👉 That's what I'm talking about on this page. I suggest you to follow this page if you want to update your knowledge about fibromyalgia and selfrehabilitation.

Liisa

Fibromyalgia recovery method helps you find routines that fit your life and help you recover from fib

02/02/2024

THE CAUSE OF FIBROMYALGIA IS KNOWN
It is often said about fibromyalgia that its cause is unknown. That's not true. It is known but cannot be defined in the same way as most other diseases. One can only define the factors that have contributed to its onset and symptoms. And therefore, it cannot be effectively treated by medical means. It has been observed, for example, in pain management. Fibromyalgia pain is caused by many different factors, and medications only affect some of them.

👉 FIBROMYALGIA IS an individual disease. There are differences in which type of symptomatology is emphasized and why. That is why some doctors say that it is for example a neurological disease or that it is an autoimmune disease. But it's neither. It just manifests in those ways as well.

👉 WHAT IS COMMON to all sufferers is that the body works abnormally. The same ways to reduce or completely eliminate the symptoms of fibromyalgia also apply to everyone.

👉 REHABILITATION AS AN OBJECT OF RESEARCH
I have been reading fibromyalgia studies way over 20 years. About five years ago, research focused on finding out what all could be working abnormally in the body of people with fibromyalgia. Now, researchers are increasingly interested in rehabilitation and why and by what means it is possible.

👉👉 For example, a recently published extensive compilation of fibromyalgia studies published between 1994 and 2022* stated that diet and lifestyle play a significant role in both symptoms and rehabilitation. That's what I've been talking about and more studies are coming out to confirm that what I have spoken is true.

IS IT A LIFESTYLE DISEASE THEN?
Yes and no, because people who follow healthy lifestyles can get fibromyalgia in the same way as people who follow bad or moderate lifestyles. It's about what your body can handle. There may be weaknesses in the body, due to which it is necessary to find a lifestyle that does not burden those too much and too regularly. And your body may need you also to help it function normally.

Liisa
P.S. It looks like the translation of my guidebook will be finished at the end of this month and I'm very excited about that 😊

Fibromyalgia recovery method helps you find routines that fit your life and help you recover from fib

12/01/2024

FIBROMYALGIA – HIGH MUSCLE PRESSURE IS A MAJOR CAUSE OF MUSCLE PAIN
A recently published study* brings further confirmation to the suspicions that even a large part of the muscle pains of fibromyalgia sufferers can be caused by increased muscle pressure. When comparing the results to healthy controls, the difference in mean muscle pressures was significant:
👉 Fibromyalgia sufferers 32.9 mmHg
👉 Healthy controls 10.6 mmHg

At the same time, the number of pain points (max 10) was examined:
👉 Fibromyalgia patients 6.6
👉 Healthy controls 0.7

This was also concluded to show a highly significant relationship between the subjects' muscle pressure and pain scores.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF INCREASED MUSCLE PRESSURE
When muscle pressures are increased, as a result:
👉 Muscle blood circulation is disturbed
👉 Muscles suffer from lack of oxygen
👉 The ability of muscle cells to produce energy with the help of oxygen weakens

All of these are significant changes that in turn cause a variety of metabolic problems and decreased performance.

MY OWN EXPERIENCE
When I rolled my shoulders, there were popping sounds from my neck and shoulder area. The physiotherapist stated that those sounds come from the muscles not being able to slide when resting on each other and not from the cartilage, as I thought. The muscles were simply so tight that they rattled against each other. When I focused on feeling the movements more closely, I noticed that she was telling the truth. The muscles there are banging!

With the rehabilitation, the muscle tension and stiffness started to ease and at the same time the pains also disappeared. The body can correct so many situations especially when it’s helped in the right way! We tend to forget that, even though we constantly witness the body's healing work in flu, bone fractures, etc.

Liisa
*Muscle Pressure Correlates With Pain Levels in Fibromyalgia Patients, 2024 Jan 8

Fibromyalgia recovery method helps you find routines that fit your life and help you recover from fib

05/01/2024

FIBROMYALGIA - RESEARCH CONFIRM THAT THE BODY WORKS ABNORMALLY
Most of the diseases are such that their cause is known, the diagnosis is confirmed by a commonly used testing method, and there is a logical explanation for the symptoms. Fibromyalgia cannot be explained in the same way.

THIS IS WHAT SCIENTISTS SAY ABOUT IT
"The pathophysiology of fibromyalgia is too complex to be justified by one model, one way of development and one factor that change the body's function."*

Fibromyalgia sufferers have individual differences in:
👉 Why it breaks out
👉 What kind of reactions occur in tissue metabolism
👉 What kind of symptoms there are

Several different groups of researchers suggest that grouping should be introduced according to the type of symptoms that the fibromyalgia sufferer has. Examples of that include gut-brain symptomatic, neurological and autoimmune i.e. inflammatory fibromyalgia.

PROPOSING GROUPING means that:
👉 Fibromyalgia is to some extent an individual disease
👉 The metabolism of many vital organs works abnormally

There is a danger in grouping that the effect of fibromyalgia on other areas is ignored. Fortunately it has also been understood that fibromyalgia is not limited to changes in only one organ system. It has been understood from research that this disease affects the whole person, the psychophysical whole.

RESEARCH ALSO TELLS ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY
If you remove the things that cause the body to function abnormally and support the health-maintaining function of the body in appropriate ways, there is a good chance to get relief from the symptoms or to remove them completely. By doing this, I have been almost 9 symptom-free years, except for dry eyes! I have put together research-based instructions on how to do it. The translation of the guidebook is in progress.

Liisa 👋
* The crosstalk of the pathophysiologic models in fibromyalgia,

Fibromyalgia recovery method helps you find routines that fit your life and help you recover from fib

31/12/2023

I wish you:
12 months of feeling better
52 weeks of being kind to yourself
365 days of what you miss the most

Happy new year 💖

Liisa