The Beginning of the End for Fibromyalgia Patients

Fibromyalgia: A Short Commentary

Frederick Wolfe and Brian Walitt

Walitt is at the NIH working on the NIH Post-infections ME/CFS Study who thinks ME/CFS, Fibromyalgia, and Lyme Disease are psychosomatic.

This "commentary" was the beginning of the end for Fibromyalgia patients. Fibromyalgia will be psychologicalized and more depression and anxiety drugs shoved down their throats with the Lightning Process and CBT being the treatments.

Note how the last few paragraphs shuts down patient support groups.

Our only hope now is the success of the EpicGenetics vaccine trial.

 

What is it about this article that people find worrying? It seems to me fairly reasonable. The suggestion is not that people with fibromyalgia have hysteria or biopsychosocial illness but that the label 'fibromyalgia' is pretty useless because its use is so dependent on preconceptions by doctors and patients. I agree with that.

The point that Pfizer may have made the name popular to sell Lyrica seems plausible. That is exactly the sort of thing that goes on at drug stands at medical meetings and sponsoring of 'symposia'.

'Fibromyalgia' is obviously a rag-bag diagnosis. It may well be mostly used by doctors to get white women who annoy them out of the door. That does not have anything to do with people with pain we do not understand having pain we do not understand.

 

I generally agree with Jonathan. Many criticisms in this paper seem apt.

I've heard Wallitt talk about fibromyalgia and I get that he is one of the true-believers of MUS psychogenesis. But people often are really effective at producing insightful criticisms of ideas and phenomena opposed to their own viewpoints, and this seems to be the case here. I think he is a space cadet and that what he would like to do with MUS would be disastrous. However, he and this other fellow Wolfe have quite lucidly laid out some real weaknesses and blind-spots in the approach of people who presumably would like a useful biomedical understanding of whatever the thing(s) we call fibromyalgia actually is/are. On the merits, that's useful contribution.

 

I don't think the new ICD-11 for Fibromyalgia coding got to where it is because of WHO or those in charge of the ICD. Someone is pushing the BPS theory. From this article in the NY Times, "Dr. Frederick Wolfe, the director of the National Databank for Rheumatic Diseases and the lead author of the 1990 paper that first defined the diagnostic guidelines for fibromyalgia, says he has become cynical and discouraged about the diagnosis. He now considers the condition a physical response to stress, depression, and economic and social anxiety.

'Some of us in those days thought that we had actually identified a disease, which this clearly is not,' Dr. Wolfe said. 'To make people ill, to give them an illness, was the wrong thing.'"

Well, I'm not saying Dr. Wolfe is behind the ICD coding, but I am saying that for the lead author of the 1990 paper that first defined Fibro to have said this in an interview and then write a "commentary" with a friend of BPS, it just holds a lot of sway with those that are involved with ICD. And why, just why didn't any Fibro orgs do anything about ICD-11?

But maybe people that don't have Fibro don't think it is a big deal. If Jose Montoya or Nancy Klimas started making comments like that about ME/CFS to the media and writing a "commentary" with Trudie Chalder expressing their issues with CFS and then the coding in ICD-11 got even worse than where it was in ICD-10CM then maybe you would have something to say. No?

Let me add this:
"So fibromyalgia is a social illness, it’s a societal illness, it’s a personal illness it has social consequences for patients and doctors and financial consequences that are worth a lot of money for pharmaceutical consequences, it is worth a lot publications to physicians. There is a lot invested in what I would call a psycho-cultural illness."

 

That someone was Brian Walitt, and Nath approved it.

http://mecfsfromme.blogspot.com/2017/01/walitt-invited-shorter-and-nath.html

 

I agree that looking at other documents it is clear that Wolfe and Wallet have very confused and unhelpful ideas about people with pain and also people with ME. That looks to be because they are dim - they do not really understand what diagnoses and diseases are about. You would have to be dim to invent the diagnostic criteria for 'fibromyalgia' in the first place to my mind. That said, most of what is said in this commentary looks to me reasonable. The central point is that the whole idea that there is a disease called fibromyalgia does not stack up. That is in stark contrast to ME where it does stack up pretty well.

 

I've been a fibro patient since 1996 and my impression of Frederick Wolfe has been very negative. He is a jerk, in my opinion, a nit-picker, a disbeliever. I discount whatever he says. He seems very aggressive and misanthropic in his views.

 

And I don't think his research is valid.