Dr. Gates: Today we have the question, “Can men develop fibromyalgia?” And we treat a lot of fibromyalgia patients in our clinic, and so, for this question, I’m going to kick it over to Dr. Rutherford so he can give his experience with the problem.
Dr. Rutherford: Because I have fibromyalgia, so yeah, the answer is men can get fibromyalgia. I do all the intakes here relative to patients coming in and being evaluated as to whether they’re an appropriate candidate for the types of things that we do, and I must say, the vast majority of candidates, fibro candidates coming in, are women. It’s unusual for a man to come in with fibromyalgia, but it does occur and they have the same, they generally have the same problems that the women have. And they have the same thyroid problems, the same gut problems, the same stress problems, for lack of a better term, kind of being a post-traumatic stress syndrome. So yeah, definitely. I had fibromyalgia. I was under a lot of stress. I got pneumonia. The next thing you know, I started getting all the symptoms of the thyroid part of it, and I started putting on weight, hair started falling out, then I started to get the fatigue, then I started to get the pain. I started to get the numbness, the tingling in the feet, and it took a couple of years for somebody to determine that I had fibromyalgia because back then, people didn’t even really take fibromyalgia seriously, and then the few that did said, “Wow, I’ve never seen it in a man before.” So it’s not as common, but we’re seeing it more and more. We are seeing it more and more.
Dr. Gates: And there are definitely many things wrong with a fibromyalgia patient to explain why the pain is there. Unfortunately, some medical practitioners and people in the lay public have a stigma surrounding fibromyalgia patients, saying, you know, “It’s all in your head. We don’t know what the problem is.” The fact of the matter is that we know that there are many, many things wrong with fibromyalgia patients. We can delineate them through a neurological exam, as well as laboratory testing, so rest assured in that. We have done several videos on fibromyalgia and the underlying causes so that you can really get more information on that, and you can find them in powerhealthtalk.com. Go to the Search tab, just search “fibromyalgia”, and you’ll see all the videos there.
So send us any other questions that you have. This is Dr. Rutherford, Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner, also a chiropractor. I’m Dr. Randall Gates, Board Certified Chiropractic Neurologist, also a chiropractor. And thanks for watching.