22/12/2023
The Fibromyalgia puzzle continues. Not sure if anyone is reading these posts, but I like having an outlet for all my thoughts and discoveries I make while practicing Osteodouce. I hope my ramblings may be of help to fellow practitioners and clients.
So, I completed Introductory Pharmacology this last term, and we explored the opioid system. In particular its role in the gate theory of pain. Of course it got my little grey cells stimulated to think about the endogenous (we make ourselves) opioid system and how it differs to the synthetic, and perhaps this may be another piece of the puzzle to chronic pain.
With abuse of synthetic opioids it causes the body to shut down its receptor sites as part of downregulation. (Similar mechanism to Insulin resistance with type 2 diabetes.) The body also doesn't make as much natural opioids due to the seemingly overabundance in the system, which also causes it to downregulate, and as a consequence causes an increase in pain.
So, with this in mind, I had a scan of my client's opioid receptors. They were really low. I had a scan of her actual opioid neurotransmitters, thinking they would also be low, but they actually came up really high. I hypothesised that the pain response which seems ubiquitous in fibro clients would cause the body to make opioids to dampen down the inflammation and pain signals of the body. However too many of them all the time would shut down many of the receptor sites as a part of downregulation. Unlike synthetic opioids, it seems the endogenous opioids are still being made however. They just are not able to relay messages to the immune cells or CNS to stop the pain signalling.
At our next session, I worked on all the systems and organs with opioid receptors, including the Central Nervous System. I harmonised them right and left side for everything. Once I got to the brain stem and internal CNS processing centres. The left hand side was much worse and took far longer to harmonise. This also matched up to the fact my client has much worse pain on her right side. (pain signals are regulated on the opposite side of the brain to the body.)
I later found this amazing study, hypothesising that fibromyalgia was an auto immune disease of the endogenous opioid system. My intuition tells me I'm getting much closer to solving out the puzzle.
Here's the study for all my anatomy and physiology nerds.
Introduction: Because of their circulation through the blood, the multiplicity of receptor sites, and the diversity of functions, opioids may most accurately be designated as a hormone. Opioids modulate the intensity of pain. In mammals, the opioid system has been .