Fibromyalgia Condition - Dr Ray Drury
Channel: The Upper Cervical Spine Center
Date: 2019-01-22

Hi. I'm Dr. Drury with the Upper Cervical Spine Center and we have patients that come to us from all over the world with fibromyalgia. Now, if you break down the word fibromyalgia, what does it mean? Fibro is hard or tight, myo is muscle, algia is pain, so it's severe muscle pain, right?  Tight muscle pain.  If you look at the medical definitions, there are so many ... Seven points, nine points, 11 points that hurt to categorize fibromyalgia. When they don't really know what exactly is going on and you have body pain, oftentimes from head to toe, then they call it fibromyalgia. 
 Now, I have seen, from experience, that a lot of our fibromyalgia patients have headaches. A lot of them have neck and back pain, arm pain, some people will have more extremity pain, some people more body pain, but a few things that we commonly see: Number one, first of all, is sleep. Most of them do not sleep well. Well, that could probably be a big part of the problem with why you have continued body aches and muscle pains. If you're not getting into deep sleep then your body never fully recovers from the previous day. It would kind of be like going to the gym and doing bicep curls every day and never giving the bicep enough time to fully heal because we have these postural muscles that support our body, fighting off gravity. Just standing you're using muscles. Just sitting you're using muscles. As we use those muscles every day the muscles break down. If we don't get into deep sleep, stage four deep sleep, then our body never fully heals those muscles that were broken down so they continue to break down. We break them down one day, we don't get a repair, the next day we break them down again, they never get into deep sleep, they never repair, so we keep breaking down the same muscles so we wind up with neck pain, almost everybody has trap pain, pain across the shoulders. Eventually it can affect the arms, the legs. 
 Now, another thing we see is a lot of times they have digestive disorders like heartburn, reflux, irritable bowel, constipation. When we look at fibromyalgia patients, and I've had several hundred over the years, what we find is all of them have two things in common. One, there was a trauma in their history. It doesn't necessarily mean they had an accident and then the next day their body hurt. It could have been 20 years ago. It could have been birth. It could have been many years ago there was some sort of an injury to the head, neck, back. It could have been a fall. It could have been a sports injury. It could have been a car accident. It could have been abuse. We've seen it all. It starts with some sort of a trauma to the head, neck, or spine that causes a misalignment.  What we have found, 100 percent of our fibromyalgia cases had a misalignment at the top of the neck. Specifically, the upper cervical spine, the top two bones in the neck. 
 That makes a lot of sense because that houses the brain stem. The brain stem comes out of the head, down to the bottom of those top two bones. That's also where the sleep center resides. That's where the brain shuts down through all four stages, from front to back, to get you into deep sleep. If there's a bone out of alignment at the top of the neck it totally screws up your whole sleeping system. So your body never gets into that deep sleep, recuperative, reparative, stage four deep sleep, so your body can actually heal. 
If you have fibromyalgia find an upper cervical doctor. Let them check you. They can take you in and within a few minutes they can find out for sure whether you have an upper cervical problem that could be causing your fibromyalgia. If you do, then they'll tell you what they need to do to fix it. If you're in the Charlotte area that includes South Carolina, Fort Mill, Rock Hill, Huntersville, Cornelius, Pineville, Matthews, if you're anywhere in the Charlotte area call our office, The Upper Cervical Spine Center 704-588-5560.  We're the office for you.  We never charge for the initial consultation to see if you have an upper cervical problem that could be causing your fibromyalgia. If you do, we'll tell you and we'll tell you what we need to do to fix it. If you don't, hey, we'll try to find another doctor, another specialist, that we believe that can help you.  Alright? 
 I hope this video helps you.  I hope you have a great day.  We look forward to meeting you.