Fibro flair ups

Yeah. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but you don't have many good options here. If you go see a doctor your options are likely to be painkillers or nothing. Other than that application of heat can help symptoms a bit...an electric blanket, hot water bottle, heat packs ect. Some people have a reduction in symptoms with a change in diet, gluten free is a popular choice. But for some people a change in diet help a lot for other just a little and for others still not at all.

Painkillers can help though, but you might have to shop around a bit. Cocodamol helps me quite a lot but I've heard others say it does nothing for them. And something like gabapentin did nothing for me but I've heard others say it helped loads...so might be worth trying.

And it's impossible to say whether this is going to be a brief rough patch or part of a general decline. For the first three years after my diagnosis I carried on working but on greatly reduced hours. But then I lost that job on account of the company being sold spent another three years trying to get a different job but not lasting more than a few days in any of them and now all I can really do is a couple of hours volunteering in a job I can just sit down in. And I can only do that with painkillers!

So basically fibromyalgia is a diagnosis that's vague to the point of being useless and it's impossible to tell what might help you or how bad things might get for you. My advice would be to try a bunch of different things to see what works and hope for the best.

Do you have any idea what might have caused your fibro in the first place (an illness, accident, stress, medication - the possibilities are many!). Also, did you do anything in particular that might have caused these flares (overdoing it at work, bad diet, stress?)

Fibro has baffled doctors for many years but is now beginning to be thought of as mitochondrial dysfunction. Your mitochondria provide all your cells (you!) with your energy and if they aren't functioning properly you will feel it everywhere as none of your cells will be able to do their job properly (muscles, joints, nerves the works). The more physical work you do the worse it will get so the bad news is it might soon be time to face the fact that whatever you do at the moment will be unsustainable very soon (ain't life a b***h?!).

As Oliver says, it might help to look at your diet and find out what is best for feeding your mitochondria (basic meat, green and colourful veg are good but all sugary and fatty carb-type foods are generally bad) - there are some good books around e.g. dr sarah myhill.

Gabapentin sometimes works in the short term but it's basically dampening down your nerve synapses and many people find they need ever increasing doses. The same for pregabalin - which a study has shown actually destroys the synapses! Both of these are reputed to be very hard to withdraw from once you're nicely settled into taking them and think you might like to stop.

If you can find out what's causing the flares (food, booze, work??) you might stand a chance of dealing with them or maybe getting rid of them. This may be a better long term prospect than embarking on a lifetime of pharmaceuticals.