Rheumatology Advance Access originally published online on May 16, 2003
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Rheumatology 2003; 42: 815-817
© 2003 British Society for Rheumatology
Editorial |
Symptoms without pathology: should we try a little tenderness?
Primary Care Sciences Research Centre, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
One approach to fibromyalgia is to regard it as being at one end of a spectrum of musculoskeletal pain and somatic symptoms. A steady flow of studies on fibromyalgia in the past two decades suggests that researchers themselves lie on a spectrum, ranging from those who accept the existence of fibromyalgia as a discrete clinical condition and investigate its causes, correlates and treatments, to those who dismantle it and attempt to investigate its component parts. There is general support for the idea that criteria such as those published by the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) have ‘provided a common language for researchers' [1], but less agreement on what exactly we are dealing with in clinical practice. What exactly is fibromyalgia?
Epidemiologists have steered towards chronic widespread pain as being the key characteristic, sometimes adding high tender point counts to define the subgroup with ‘fibromyalgia’. However, there is general
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  G. E. Ehrlich Symptoms without pathology Rheumatology, April 1, 2004; 43(4): 535 - 535. [Full Text] [PDF]
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