Flower Arranging Helps Reduce Fibromyalgia Pain

According to this Medscape report https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/916994

Unfortunately for me, lifting my arms is never therapeutic. Strong floral odors can be unpleasant also.

Surely the more severe cases (who couldn't reliably turn up at the venue) dropped out.

 

How ridiculous! Doing any enjoyable activity would temporarily distract from pain but you have to be well enough to do it in the first place. I quite agree @shak8 - if you're well enough to do an activity, it is already a self-selecting group....and it would be interesting to know how the pain was after, the next day, few days after etc.

 

These flowers...they wouldn't be poppies would they

 

Hehe, but there were a lot of potheads as participants.

 

Not deckchair arranging?

 

I mean, kinda.

(for those unfamiliar, the Sackler family is very prominently responsible for a large part of the opioid crisis in the US and has recently been found guilty of just that and hiding their blood-stained fortune away from prosecution).

 

Seriously confirming that the bar to get a medical license is actually way, way too low.

 

I am much more interested in the effect basket weaving has on fibromyalgia, or painting, or being Napoleon.

Has any research been done on these yet, and if not why not, as they clearly think that people with fibromyalgia require exactly the same, and only the same, treatment as people on a MH ward (for whom there is also the possibility that flower arranging is no more effective at helping cope with a 'break' than, say, doing something that is not flower arranging.)

 

There is no placebo control. Rookie mistake. They should have had patient folding clothes and arranging them in chest of drawers as control group.

Then this:

Sigh. Flower arranging while high... tsk tsk tsk...

So patients still have tender points. But who cares if you smoke pot and arrange flowers in a pot?

 

So presumably flower unarranging would make you feel more ill?

 

I reckon that red flower is hiding the doobie.

 

I can confirm this: I haven't arranged any flowers today, and I feel like crap!

 

This is pretty much the approach I faced when after over a year of waiting, I finally got to our local Pain 'Management'- unbelievably stupid advice, consisting of: you are going to be in pain for the rest of your life, in fact your pain is going to get worse (I'm already not coping, but thanks for that!), you need to carry on as if you don't have the pain ( for whose benefit?), and hide it from everyone ( again- why?), and look at this diagram, which shows that when you are HAPPY you notice pain less, therefore be HAPPY and problem solved!

It is hard to believe that people get paid to do this kind of stuff.

 

Ah you must be in the control group. Try looking for a nice vase with some pretty flowers in and shuffle them all up so they are discombobulated and then get back to us.

I feel the level of evidence gathering here could result in a Cochrane review being the outcome of this thread.