Warning and new to Fibromyalgia Suffers

This chapter was just listed online regarding vaccinations and fibromyalgia in: The Clinicians Safety Research Guide, 2018, by Springer: pp.241-243 titled “Do Vaccinations Cause Fibromyalgia or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS)? The article is used in a handbook to train and advise medical clinicians. The chapter asserts that vaccinations do not cause either disorder.A similar posting appears on line under John Hopkins

This is a topic that has been debated ever since the Gulf war and further appears in discussions as to whether giving vaccinations to those diagnosed with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome can cause more damage than good. Research continues but generally suggests that giving vaccinations to those suffering from these disorders leads to damaging outcomes.

But readers should know, in evaluating this advice. that in 2019, F. Wolfe et al., Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken), Mar, 2017, DOI 10. 1002/acr.23731.EPub 2019 Feb 6,
in a study run by several American and German university medical centers, discovered that diagnostic agreement on fibromyalgia by two medical clinicians using the same formal criteria was no more than fair (k=.41). Even more troubling, only 49% of criteria positive patients were identified as positive while 51% were missed, and 10% of criteria negative patient were identified as positive. In other words, the authors demonstrated that clinicians failed to correctly identify half of those who met criteria standards and included 10% of patients who did not meet strict criteria.

In effect, then, this study strongly suggests that clinicians are being trained and advised to tell patients that vaccines pose no dangers in causing fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome when the diagnostic identification criteria on which the research was based fails to translate into accurate clinical identification in more than 50% of cases.

This completely invalidates any conclusions drawn about the potential dangers of vaccination in this client population. One cannot draw conclusions from such a population which is so poorly identified and then make statements about potentially health damaging procedures,

Moreover, it is my fear that clinicians will read this chapter as permission to give fibromyalgia patients vaccinations, ignoring 20 years of research cautioning against doing so lest the vaccinations increase autoimmune attack and inflammation levels.

It is a cognitive error but one easy to make, extrapolating that if vaccinations cannot cause these disorders, then they are not likely to make them more disabling. It is a smoothing of detail cognitive error, but easily made.

Please be advised that being vaccinated for the flu, DPT, hepatitis, etc, has been found to have associated negative effects in many patients over a number of studies. Above all, do not let the physician give you multiple vaccines at once.

The good news is that another recent study just identified accurate metabolic markers for fibromyalgia and those markers are currently being developed into an accurate medical identification test. So at least one aspect of the fibromyalgia/chronic fatigue story will become much more clear cut in the next several years (B. G. Molatji, et al., 2017, BMC Neurology, v 17).