Of all the diagnosed conditions that we see in our office in the last 26 years, I’ve probably seen more fibromyalgia cases than any other condition. I think that’s because fibromyalgia is kind of a broad term. If you have seven points, or nine, or twelve, or particular points of pain, then they call it fibromyalgia. What I’ve seen is basically from a medical standpoint, when they rule everything else out and you still have musculoskeletal pain. They pretty much call it fibromyalgia. What does fibromyalgia mean? Well, “fibro”is“hard or“tight,“myo”is “muscle,“algia” ispain.Tight muscle pain is really a broad diagnosis. But one of the things that we have found is most of our fibromyalgia patients have musculoskeletal pain. It can be spinal, it can be extremities, arms, or legs. Most of them will have some degree of headache, a large degree of fatigue usually, and oftentimes some digestive disorders. And then, of course, there’s the fibro fog, which is like a lack of mental clarity, feeling kind of light-headed, and you can’t focus.
Now, what we have found is with almost all of them, their sleep is affected, and we have found that if there’s a problem at the top of the neck, specifically the Upper Cervical part of the neck, then it can misalign and put pressure on the brainstem. Now, the sleep center resides in the heart of the brainstem. It’s in the very middle. Therefore, it can easily be affected. If one of the bones gets misaligned and closes down on the opening, it puts pressure on the brainstem affecting the sleep center, then it affects your quality of sleep. Now, the way the sleep center works is it shuts the brain down from back to front through the four stages of sleep.
Now, what’s very important is that you get into deep sleep. Deep sleep is when your body recovers. That’s the fourth stage, so if there’s something out of line in your neck and if it’s interfering with your ability to get into stage four deep sleep, then your body never fully recovers. It’s like going to the gym and doing the same exercise every day, and never giving those muscles an opportunity to recover. Then they’re constantly being torn down, so they constantly are sore and achy and fatigued. If this is happening for you, if you have a misalignment in the neck interfering with how you sleep, then of course you’re going to be fatigued, but at the same time your whole body gets achy, and it gets sore because we’re constantly fighting gravity. We’re constantly using muscles, postural muscles: we’re walking, we’re sitting, and we’re moving. We’re using muscles constantly, and if your body’s not fully recovering, if those muscles don’t have the opportunity to heal, then they just get achy and sore, fatigued, and they wear down.
What we’ve found at The Upper Cervical Spine Center is we find the problem, the cause of your fibromyalgia, and one thing I will tell you; medicine doesn’t have much luck addressing even the symptoms with medications. It’s very important to get to the root cause of the fibromyalgia. If we can find that, and if we can correct it, like taking your foot off of the garden hose. The messages to the body open back up, the brainstem gets clearer, and the sleep center functions normally. The first thing people usually notice is they rest better. And if you have fibromyalgia, I know that’s a huge deal. As you start to sleep deeper, your body recovers better, your brain gets more clearer, and all the communication from your brain and your body starts to reconnect and starts to open up. That’s how the body heals.