‘Gray Area’ Diseases Prove Difficult to Treat, Understand

Back when she was a hard-charging sales manager for a large corporation, Martha Grierson once encountered an employee diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a disorder about which Grierson knew nothing. The man said his condition wouldn’t allow him to maintain his challenging workload and requested lighter duties.

Grierson joined her fellow managers in aggressively questioning the man, concurring with the general assessment that he was a shirker unwilling to work as hard as everyone else.

In the subsequent two decades, as fibromyalgia has largely taken over Grierson’s life, the Winter Haven resident has often thought of that man.

“I’m so ashamed, looking back, that I was one of the people who sat in on that management meeting and said terrible things,” said Grierson, 52. “I’m so sorry for it; I didn’t know any better. Little did I know I would be getting the same thing and be given the same response.”

Grierson’s original skepticism makes it possible for her to understand, if not easier to tolerate, the questioning attitudes many people hold toward fibromyalgia, perhaps the most prominent in a category of illnesses with unclear causes, imprecise diagnoses and no cure or clearly effective treatment options. The maladies - also including chronic fatigue syndrome and lupus - generate controversy and dispute in the medical community.

The ailments, their vagueness defying the preferred precision of the medical realm, attract pejorative labels: “gray-area illness” or “wastebasket diagnosis.”

“‘Gray-area medicine’ can be interpreted as a euphemism,” said Dr. Edward Lubin, a pain-management specialist at Winter Haven’s Gessler Clinic, “and it leads one to think maybe what we’re dealing with is … malingering, maybe we’re dealing with something other than a medical condition. But to be fair, the gray area exists in the minds of physicians and the diagnostic process, not in the symptoms and suffering of patients. That’s not gray; they’re suffering.”

Those with the ailments insist their pain is just as real as it would be if they had cancer, diabetes or any other established and scientifically verifiable disease with clear causes and treatment regimens.

“Imagine the aching of a really bad case of the flu, then times it about 10 times,” said Polk City’s Lynn Anderson, 52, diagnosed a decade ago with fibromyalgia. “Every inch of you hurts. I feel like I’m about 152. There are days when I feel so old. It makes you feel like you’ve aged 10 years or more.”

Grierson talked about her case: “For me, one of the symptoms is feeling my skin is on fire. At times I can’t even stand the feeling of clothes on my skin.”

Lakeland’s Laura Bodner, another fibromyalgia patient, described her quality of life on some days as a negative number on a scale of one to 10. Bodner, who has absorbed dubious reactions from doctors, said three women in a stretch of five houses on her street have the disorder.

“For something that doesn’t exist,” she said, “there’s an awful lot of people with it.”

Source : www.theledger.com