“One of the really frustrating things for patients with fibromyalgia is that there’s nothing to measure in labs or in X-rays. And sometimes people think if you can’t measure something then maybe it’s not real. So we are looking at bio-markers, we’re doing sophisticated X-rays, like functional MRI and spec-scanning to understand what happens in the brains of patients with fibromyalgia when they have pain, what happens to their brains when we treat that pain.”
Doctor Cawkwell says people are rarely hospitalized because of fibromyalgia, and most patients do not die from it. She says this is why it can be difficult to know how many people suffer from the disease.
Researcher Brian Walitt believes that all of the advertising for Lyrica may be bad for people with fibromyalgia. Doctor Walitt is the director of the Fibromyalgia Research Center at Georgetown Hospital Center in Washington, DC. He is studying sixty-seven patients with the disease. He is critical of doctors who look to drugs first to help their fibromyalgia patients.
“Much of what I do is actually remove people from their medications so they can remember what they were like.”
Doctor Walitt says the heavy advertising of a drug to treat fibromyalgia may give some people the idea that it can be cured. He says that is not reality. And he says studies of fibromyalgia patients have shown that very few get much better, and some get much worse, even with treatment. He says it is wrong to expect that patients will take a drug and all of their symptoms will go away.
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25