The first Two types of pain

(Taken from article posted at: FM/CFS/ME Recources Website )

"You hear a lot about "fibromyalgia pain," but really those of us with fibromyalgia (FM) experience several kinds of chronic pain.

Medically speaking, only a few of the fibromyalgia-pain types I talk about here have actual names and definitions. But just as Eskimos have several words for snow, I feel like we need to have several ways to name, define and categorize our pain. I've created some of my own categories, based on my own experience and on conversations I've had with other fibromites. My hope is that understanding the medical terms will help us communicate better with doctors and other healthcare providers, while my categories will help you understand your illness and let you know you're not alone in feeling these things.


Types of Fibromyalgia Pain

The first 3 types of fibromyalgia pain are medically defined:

Hyperalgesia
Allodynia
Paresthesia

The next 4 types are my own creation, which will be obvious by their names. I don't recommend using these terms in a doctor's office (unless you want to be seen as crazy), but these labels may help you get to know your body's quirks, triggers, patterns, etc.:

Knife in the Voodoo Doll
Randomly Roving Pain
Sparkler Burns
Rattled Nerves

Hyperalgesia & Fibromyalgia

"Hyper" means excess and "algesia" means pain. Hyperalgesia is the medical term for pain amplification in FM. Our brains appear to take normal pain signals and "turn up the volume," making them more severe than they would normally be.

Most of the drugs used for managing FM pain are aimed, at least in part, at reducing hyperalgesia.


Allodynia & Fibromyalgia

A symptom that perplexes a lot of us, especially when it's new, is allodynia. That's what it's called when your skin hurts to the touch, and when mild pressure from clothing or gentle massage causes pain. A lot people describe allodynia as similar to a bad sunburn.

Allodynia is a fairly rare type of pain - other than FM, it's only associated with a handful of conditions, including neuropathy, postherpetic neuralgia (shingles) and migraine. Allodynia is believed to be a hypersensitive reaction that may result from the central sensitization associated with FM. The pain signals originate with specialized nerves, called nociceptors, that sense information about things like temperature and painful stimuli right from the skin.

Allodynia comes in 3 forms:

Tactile, which is pain from touch or gentle pressure
Mechanical, which is from something moving across your skin
Thermal, which is pain from heat or cold that's not severe enough to damage tissues

(...)

If you have allodynia, massage therapy may make it worse. If you feel other aspects of your health would benefit from massage, be sure to discuss allodynia with your doctor and massage therapist and keep track of how treatments impact this symptom."

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I am going to try to give a picture of how this affects me. I want to document what I go through- a journal of sorts. So this is what comes to mind. :)

Tactile Allodynia: For years I have had a couple of issues that I never understood. This type of pain explains it. The first is my shins. My husband learned to NEVER touch my shins. I used to describe it as "being so ticklish it's painful." In all actuality- it is just painful. Period. The other thing is that for as long as I can recall now, I hate it when someone attempts to massage my shoulders when I am stressed. My husband had a hard time understand why I didn't like. Why it was painful. "What do you mean it hurts? I wasn't even doing it that hard."

Mechanical: Occasionally I will have a painful tingling sensation in response to clothing, like a skirt for example, moving across my skin. But, thankfully, it is infrequent.

Thermal: I do not have a problem with HEAT. The hotter the better. In fact my dad insisted I didn't like my water at a temp that burns many people...so I put the water on to the temp at which I shower and it feels so good. I used my beverage thermometer. 116 degrees. yikes! No, heat is not an issue. (Not talking about hot weather...don't do well in hot weather of 90 or higher.) But...cold...? An ice cube "burns" my skin. Being cold makes my hands ache something terrible. I can't handle mixing up meatloaf if the beef is fresh out of the fridge.

That's it for now as far as types of pain. Trying to keep this in bite sized pieces. :)