My girlfriend is 21 and has a bad case of fibromyalgia.
I have to try to help her.
Aside from funding or conducting research, the only way I know how to provide her with some relief is to treat her condition like the ultimate pain point and start hacking together a startup to solve it.
The first step is reaching out to the HN community for cofounders, leads, and links to the state of the art in fibromyalgia research that might escape an initial googling to get things jumpstarted, whatever you got.
Let's cure fibromyalgia.
Update: A great user at hn provided the following awesome resources:
Start here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=fibromyalgia Scan regularly: http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=fibromyalgia Join collectives: http://www.fmcpaware.org/Heal the person, not the condition: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3357550/
You are redirecting. Engineers do this often when presented with an unsolvable relationship or emotional problem. Lots of inventions have been made this way. Frustration is the mother of invention.
ReplyDeleteI have chronic pain, I've learned to cope. I am still learning how every day. While I am not sure I want to dissuade you from this endeavor (it is a good cause!) I am going to advise you that she needs to learn to cope, not expect you to fix her. Nothing can undo coping quite like hope. Even more important, she needs to be independent in her coping. You can be there for her, but she has to face her pain alone and master it on her own terms. Good luck to you and even more to her.
I've had chronic pain for about 7 years which initially manifested itself as RSI - though with the "trigger points" which I think are typical of fibromyalgia. I'm beginning to think more and more that the pain has now moved away from something physical into something I've learned - it's become a habit. I mainly say this after various physiotherapy/chiropractic treatments didn't work and only seemed to make the symptoms temporarily disappear - but didn't seem to address the underlying problem.
ReplyDeleteThe two most things I've found helpful are meditation and Alexander Technique. I'm now becoming able to (not yet always, but improving) relax the tense muscles in my shoulders - and doing so makes the "trigger points" disappear.
The biggest problem I see with this stuff is that it falls between the "mind body" split that the medical profession seems to have fallen into - "physical" doctors somewhat dismiss the problem as "all in your head". If you're looking for some sort of startup, something bridging the gap between "physical" and "mental" might be most relevant.
Take it or leave it, but wool clothing was shown to decrease symptoms in a research paper in Turkey. Also, physical therapy can be helpful along with massage.
ReplyDeleteJust give this a little read. http://norml.org/library/item/fibromyalgia
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