LogFAQs > #910440007

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2018/oct/08/trauma-fibromyalgia-kavanaugh-triggered-lena-dunham-flare-up

If you felt physically sick at Brett Kavanaughs appointment to the supreme court, you are not alone. Lena Dunham, the writer and star of the HBO series Girls, links a flare-up of her fibromyalgia to Dr Christine Blasey Fords allegations of Kavanaughs abuse. She told her Instagram followers: It felt like every cell in my neck was singing Yesterday, I felt like I was suspended in gel, and when I meditated a line of pain zipped from my neck to my foot. With such a collection of symptoms, Dunham admits: Its hard to shake the feeling I am crazy. But this is fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition with no known cause and unclear pathophysiology (no one knows what functional changes in the body cause its manifestation). Symptoms include widespread muscle pain and tenderness, headaches, tingling and numbness in the limbs, overwhelming fatigue and discomfort with light or noise. People with fibromyalgia are often hypersensitive to painful stimuli and women are affected more than men.

So could Dunhams fibromyalgia have been reactivated, as she claims, by the stress of Kavanaughs appointment? The condition is thought to be a central nervous system disorder of pain regulation. That people with fibromyalgia are hypersensitive suggests that the brain is not processing pain properly. It fails to distinguish between what should and should not hurt.
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