What are the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia?

There is a specific diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia; chronic, widespread pain in combination with other classic symptoms. Watch as family medicine specialist Jennifer Caudle, DO, shares the symptoms doctors look for when diagnosing fibromyalgia.

Transcript

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One of the things that's really important to do when talking with your doctor is to go through all the symptoms that you have, not only the chronic, widespread pain sites that you might have,

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but the other symptoms as well. Because your doctor is going to need to rule out other conditions.

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Well, there's actually a pretty specific diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia, but in a nutshell, it consists of two main parts.

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The first criteria or the first part is that people need to have chronic, widespread pain. That means pain throughout their body in multiple places.

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The other part of it is the other symptoms. That's things like fatigue, waking feeling unrefreshed, cognitive issues,

00:53

and sometimes even other symptoms like reflux, or heartburn, irritable bowel, et cetera. So it really is the combination of those two symptom types

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that creates fibromyalgia. One of the things that's really important to do when talking with your doctor

01:09

is to go through all the symptoms that you have, not only the chronic, widespread pain sites that you might have, but the other symptoms as well.

01:16

Because your doctor is going to need to rule out other conditions, but also, really tally up the symptoms that you're having to make sure