Winning at Fibromyalgia

My patients often ask me: How do I know whether what I feel is my old fibromyalgia or something new and serious? in this episode I share my own recent experience after developing new symptoms of numbness tingling in R hand and R foot, how it freaked me out and what helped me feel better. The story is still evolving :-)

In this episode I give you suggestion on how to handle situation when you experience acute on top of chronic pain of fibromyalgia.

Episode 45: What does the pain relief in fibromyalgia really come down to?

Hello friends!

So Excited to be here, brining you episode #45.

The focus of today’s episode is zeroing in on what is the pain reduction really about. I had an epiphany very recently and realized that I have to share it with you because it just may help some of you to think of pain relief in fibromyalgia and other chronic pain conditions differently.

While I was still working on this episode, 2 days ago, I was in a car accident, I rear-ended a truck. I got distracted while in slow traffic, the line of cars stopped at a light and I did not realize this soon enough. The reason I am mentioning this is that I had yet another re-inforcement of the concept I am talking to you about!

So the question is: what does the pain relief in chronic pain and fibromyalgia really come down to? In a nutshell, the pain relief comes down to finding evidence for and focusing on all the ways our nervous system and brain ARE working FOR US as opposed to looking for evidence of how they do not. That’s it.

Let me explain.

If you listen to enough of my episodes or videos you know I view the process of recovery from chronic pain in 3 main steps or strategies:

I notice that often, even myself, being an experienced pain coach that I am, I tend to first think of the worst case scenario when I experience worsening of pain. Basically, my brain offers the following thought: “You see?? It is NOT working! Your pain cannot and will not get better!” And in the past I would succumb to that thought which would lead me down the spiral of doom and would not lead to anything good, seriously.

The good news is that this is normal, Our brains, our lovely brains that want to keep us safe and comfortable and love familiarity above all else, even it is not serving us, will offer us that thought. And our job is to say, well, dear brain, how about focusing on ways this DOES work?

The way to achieve this, is to sit down with a pen and paper, and think of all the times your body DID do something that may have delighted or surprised you, or may not have even registered in your attention, basically you took it for granted. I will give you some examples:

To me that’s a clear evidence of how our nervous system and pain generators in the brain LISTEN and RESPOND to what we feed them. The words we tell ourselves matter because our primitive brains, and the structures in the brain whose sole purpose is to look for danger are looking and listening. And we can direct them.

So I invite all of you to think of ways how the “system” meaning our central nervous system, IS working right, is working for us.

Above all, I wish you a very happy and prosperous and safe and HEALHTY new year of 2023.

WAF Episode 44: The first of its kind, Winning at Fibromyalgia online course is born!

https://www.martinaziegenbeinmdcoaching.com/course-pre-sale-landing-page

https://www.martinaziegenbeinmdcoaching.com/offers/mgeMgobJ/checkout

Hello friends!

Today is a special day. First of all, I am recording this from my “studio” in England and when it airs, I will still be in England!  Of course, I don’t have a studio in England, I am visiting my sister and she lives in England, about 30 minutes southwest from London and so temporarily my recording studio is here 

 Second, today is day 3 of my new Winning at Fibromyalgia online course going live, meaning being available for purchase. This course is basically the labor of my study and research and seeing patients over the past 12 months and my desire to let the knowledge know the large swaths of people with fibromyalgia and other forms of similar chronic pains.

 What triggered me to get myself into high gear action was the culmination of events. I mentioned to you in one of the prior episodes I am working on a tedx talk about this new way of handling and reducing pain in fibromyalgia. I have continued seeing many women in my office with fibromyalgia and one of them literally told me she has felt crazy in medical offices when she would talk to physicians and other health care providers about her pain. Because she looks well, she did not feel believed, even dismissed. She felt she was viewed as a drug seeker when all she wanted was feeling better, feeling NORMAL.

If health care makes people feel crazy, something is very wrong. We can do better. I can do better.

 So I have put together an online format of material that I normally teach my patients in person, over the course of several sessions. It is an online program that teaches you everything about fibromyalgia and how to help yourself. It includes scientific information that I dissect into small digestible pieces. You learn at your own pace. From the comfort of your home.

 I am offering it for a super discounted price of 249 USD to a small number of participants who are eager to take advantage of this opportunity and realize this is a rare opportunity. This small group of learners we ask for your feedback on the course.

 t will only be available for purchase at this price tag until this coming Thursday. We will then close the cart and reopen in December at probably doubled price.8

 So why is it such a big deal?

I am obviously biased and I believe this is a great deal.

I say you jump in and see for yourself.

And until next time 

Today's guest: Dr. Robyn Tiger

Physician | Trauma-Informed Self-Care Coach | Podcaster

Dr. Tiger shares so much good stuff it is hard to know where to start.

Robyn Tiger, MD is on a mission to empower busy humans with self-care tools backed by science and research. She does a lot of work with physicians on the verge of burnout or coming out of burnout but the tools she discusses in this episode are literally for EVERYONE.

At the beginning of the episode i asked her how she got to do the work she does - and she shares her OWN journey, how terrible her body felt while she was still working as a breast imaging radiologist. Her symptoms included body pain reminiscent of fibromyalgia and HOST of other symptoms that were ALL related to stress but nobody could diagnose it for her!

The signifcance of this episode that MOST of our chronic stress symptoms are completely reversible! IF and WHEN we are ready to start implementing simple, effective and ancient tools that old cultures thousands of years ago before us knew.

Dr. Tiger is certified in yoga therapy, meditation and life coaching. She offers innovative CME accredited courses, private coaching, and podcast that focus on complete physical, mental, and emotional well-being and resilience

When she’s not busy supporting her colleagues, Robyn can be found enjoying her own self-care through hiking, paddle boarding, meditating, yoga, playing with her dog, husband and kids in the mountains of Asheville, NC.

SHe is a host of Stress Free MD and her website is:

https://www.stressfreemd.net/

Episode 40: You experience an acute jolt of pain – now what?

Welcome to episode 40 of WAF Podcast!

I am recording this episode exactly on my podcast first anniversary! I launched The Winning at Fibromyalgia podcast exactly a year ago, October 15th 2021. It is now October 15th 2022. This is the 40th episode.

I could choose to be upset over not giving you 52 episodes – one per week.

But instead I am choosing to be grateful and excited. Grateful for all of you who listen and have found some form of helpful information, in one shape or another. I get excited when I get feedback that something I talked about or mention was helpful. I am also excited because a year ago I did not think I would do this, that I would be able to produce 40 episodes. It means putting my thoughts into words, on paper/computer screen, then recording it. It means picking and inviting guests on my podcast, recording the interview. Then listening to it and helping to edit. Hours and hours of work.

So, I am celebrating. This entire weekend. One of the questions I have for you – what are you celebrating when you look at the past year? I don’t think we should only reflect on the past year at the end of the year. I feel we can reflect any time of the year, especially if there is an anniversary.

It was also recently an anniversary of 8th year of my Mom passing. And I am not quite ready to talk about that on my podcast.

 I am so excited to be back. I have shared with you I have been going through a rather difficult time of accepting a dissolution of a romantic relationship. I am doing better and deeply appreciate all the messages of support and encouragement and love from you. It feels like I am almost over the hump 

Today, in addition to this being a celebratory podcast of one year anniversary  I am choosing to share another personal experience, intimately related to my story of fibromyalgia. Before I get to it, I do want to say one thing – aimed at all of you, my lovely women who suffer with pain every day, who wonder whether it can ever change, whether YOU can ever change it. I am here to tell you – YES YOU ABSOLUTELY CAN!

It is within your power to reduce your pain and turn the entire course of your fibromyalgia story around! I see it on myself, I see it in my patients, rewiring of the pain pathways, the pain neural circuits CAN be rewired, NEW neural connections can be created! Every minute. Every hour of every day, we have an opportunity create these new neuronal connections! That will translate in less pain and more enjoyment, and you doing things that you cannot imagine right now because you cannot see beyond the current moment 

My fibromyalgia back pain has been flaring through this break up time (and coming and going anniversary of my Mom’s passing). I have been doing somatic tracking every day and it is really good in the evening when I am relaxing and definitely flares up during the day when I am at work. But it has been tolerable. Now I decided a break up would be a good time to go to my old crossfit gym here on the cape. I was a member for several months last year but quit last September and joined more of a regular globo gym. I felt I was too destroyed after each workout back then, and my joints were sore after – I do have rheumatoid arthritis and I just did not feel it was right. 

So with this break up I decided to return to the crossfit. And there the second day I went, we were doing push press and split jerks. That’s a movement when you push the bar above your head while you catch it below – with your legs slightly apart, as if in a lounging position. And I overdid it, too enthusiastic, I put on too much weight. ON the way down, as I was receiving the bar with weights, I felt a pop/sharp pain in my R shoulder, followed by a temporary weakness, to the point of not being able to lift the arm for a few moments.

My first though was “no! I hurt my shoulder again!”, I do have a history of R shoulder injury/partial rotator cuff tear, from 10 years ago, that responded to PT but would flare every time I overdid things in Crossfit – lifting things above my head. And my first thought went to – OMG, I MUST HAVE NOW COMPLETELY TORN it, that’s why I have weakness and sharp pain, why else would the pain be there so sharp???

I was in a pure panic mode.

And this is where something magic happened and the reason I am sharing this episode with you. I WAS ABLE TO PAUSE. I was able to put a pause, a break between the trigger (the movement that I believed re-injured my shoulder) and my spiraling out of control, the dooms spiral. I already put the bar back on the rack.

 I went to the coach. I told her what happened/that I was worried about re-injury.

Then I tried and succeeded in calming myself down.

Two main things happened:

But right now you DON”T KNOW FOR SURE that you torn it. You just know that it is hurting.

Can you TRY to calm your breathing and mind down, and see whether it helps?

The coach came by in the meantime seeing I am trying to stretch and gave me a ball that they refer to as “Chinese torture” in my gym  She said I could try to use that to loosen up my muslces.

 Guys

That’s what did the trick – I was leaning against the ball against the wall on the SOREST spot on my R shoulderblade, to the point it was taking my breath away, that’s how sharp the pain was. YET I was successfully releasing the tension in my shoulders, I let the shoulders drop down, while staying calm and telling myself to stay calm, with my breath, with the pain, and applying the pressure.

I did NOT go to push press that gym session.

Over the next 48 hours, my pain went down from 9/10 down to 2-3/10. The pain was really severe that evening and I had trouble even just doing dishes – any motion with my right hand INCLUDING brushing teeth was flaring the pain. But I continued to breathe through all of it, and did not lose the sight of the fact that I would know what to do if the pain was not getting better.

The pain was better the next morning.

I went back to the gym the next day but did NOT do any overhead activity. I did stretching at home and in the gym for the next few days.

Then over the next several days the pain went almost back to baseline.

SO why am I talking about it?

For the following 3 reasons:

The second thing I did was I BELIEVED I COULD HANDLE things EVEN IF I HAD TRAUMA IN FORM OF TEAR> I never for a moment steered away from that though. And you can too – even if you are not a physician, you can have faith that you are able to seek help if the pain does not get better after the initial steps outlined above, or if it is getting worse in the first 48 hrs after injury.

Episode 39: The pain of a break up is both emotional and physical

Hi! Welcome to episode #39!

Today I am going to talk about the pain of a break up! It is something I first heard about a year ago when I was taking pain reprocessing courses and at that time I found it fascinating. I was recently dating and it did not occur to me I would be “testing” on myself 

Break ups hurt. NO matter how many times you have thought about breaking up with the person or questioned whether your relationship was going to last – when it actually happens, and you like, loved them, it hurts.

So first, I met a great man, after not dating for almost 6 years, and he swept me off my feet and now we are broken up.  That’s the short story.

There is a study, believe it or not, that explored what happens when people are shown pictures of someone they loved/someone who broke up with them. Brain MRIs were done at the same time. They recruited 40 people for this, all of them had experienced a recent unwanted break up. The other part of the experiment was stimulation of the left forearm with a hot probe. Auch. And what they found is that the signal that is picked up at the time of looking at a picture of your ex overlaps significantly/almost identically with area in the brain that processes physical pain! Isnt’ this fascinating?

These findings give a new meaning to the sentence “break up hurts”. Because it does. And you can even prove it on the functional brain MRI!

But joking aside, these findings basically shed new insight into how emotional experiences lead to development of physical pain. They are consistent with the research on “embodiment” which means that emotional experiences are closely intricately and intimately connected to the physical sensation and processing of pain.

This explains why people may experience an uptick in pain after a breakup or whenever they are going through a difficult time that is accompanied by some kind of social rejection.

So the next question is what to do, can you make it better?

First of all, heart break is always hard and I am not here to tell you will make the pain go away. Break up means a loss of a relationship and no matter how bad it was, you still have to mourn the good and beautiful and wonderful things that you had experienced together. However, I do claim that what I am about to say will make YOU feel better about the whole situation and in turn, may improve the pain.

The pain can be all consuming and excruciating. If you are anyone like me, who falls hard and experiences everything intensely, you will feel the pain intensely. trying to run away from it does not help. Acknowledge It is there and that it is ok.

You may cry, and feel intense sorrow, that may make it hard to function – let yourself feel it is ok. Love on yourself. Try to think of what gives you sense of love and reassurance. Then feel it, imagine it. I have been imagining a picture of me being a small girl, feeling sad and lost, and giving that little girl a huge loving warm and reassuring hug. Telling her it is going to be ok.

Remember many other people have gone through this and you will get through this too. Almost anything we experience in life, and especially a break up, other humans have overcome. So can you. So can I.