Thursday, April 22, 2010

Five Tips To Support Your Loved Ones With Fibromyalgia

Living with Fibromyalgia can be debilitating both physically and emotionally. Most of us are living in pain without a real clear solution to pain relief. Fibromyalgia is an overactive nervous system. The pain is often described as achy or flu-like. Imagine that achy feeling you experience when you hit your funny bone, except it is throughout the entire body. On top of that your muscles are tight and pulling. Your muscle fibers are throbbing. You experience headaches, low back pain, sciatica, repetitive motion type pain, IBS, fatigue, insomnia and fogginess.

And on top of it our loved ones either watch on helplessly or do not believe the pain is real.

Believe they are in pain. People with Fibromyalgia feel unsupported, misunderstood, lost and frustrated.

Develop an action plan of how you can support them day-to-day to help avoid flare-ups and another action plan of how to support them during a flare-up.

When they are in a flare-up immediately implement the action plan or ask what you can do to help them be more comfortable and do it. This is not the time to problem solve why they are in a flare-up. Asking them if they didn't exercise or if they were stressed is not supportive at this time and it is blaming. It is not their fault. They are in pain and want to be in less pain as soon as possible. If you had slammed your hand in a car door, most of us would want bandages and ice, not an assessment as to what we did to slam our hand in the car door.

Learn as much as possible on Fibromyalgia - read information on the internet, attend support groups, participate in online forums and Facebook groups on Fibromyalgia.

Make the lifestyle habits to decrease Fibromyalgia pain a lifestyle for the entire family. Fibromyalgia is managed through exercise, nutrition, stress management, massage, good sleeping habits and some medications.

Lisa Meloche is president of Bodywork Alternatives Massage Therapy and Founder of the FibroMasters program which includes coaching programs and self-help DVD's and books such as the Fibromyalgia Self-Massage and Stretch DVD.