Fibromyalgia

[Lyric]

I think I could tolerate it better if I didn't get out of bed every morning feeling like some evil gnome spent the night beating the #@%& out of me with baseball bat. If you've ever been in a car accident, or had a tumble down a set of stairs--you know how *horrible* you feel the next day, like every inch of your body got bruised and banged-up somehow, and it hurts to move? THAT is what fibromyalgia feels like.

It'll get better once the Motrin and the Lortab start working. In the meantime, please feel free to deluge me with kittens and hugs.
I want to hide inside one of these------> :grouphug:

[Heidi]

1. I'm sorry you're in pain, oktoberain.

:hug: :grouphug: :grouphug: :grouphug:

[Lyric]

4. It's not so bad now.

Zee mediceen, she iz working! ;) :hug:

[Maraya1969]

2. Oh oktoberain I am so sorry you have to go through this.

I know some people with it and it is no fun as you say. All I can offer now is.....

:hug: :grouphug:

And maybe someday they will find a cure.

[Lyric]

5. Meh. They really have very little incentive to find cures

these days. Treatments, yes--especially the kind you can patent and milk for all it's worth. Cures? Well that would cut the market for all those new and expensive treatment drugs that you have to keep buying for years and years and years. I am convinced that the reason we don't have a cure for cancer yet is because it's more profitable to make people pay for years and years of treatment.

I am very pessimistic and suspicious about the pharmaceutical industry. :( However, I am Very Grateful for the :hug: :)

[TZ]

6. Actually

They now have VACCINES to treat cancer...not only the HPV to prevent but others that are shown to destroy tumors. So no, as a biotech professional I can assure you that the reason why there isn't a cure (besides the fact that cancer is a whole bunch of different diseases and causes)
.Also things like gene therapy and monoclonal antibody treatments which dramatically reduce the amount of treatments people need. If anything there is a lot of new products that are actually REDUCING the need for long term therapy for many diseases...

[Lyric]

9. I'm sorry, turtlensue.

I didn't mean to offend you. I respect your profession. I have the greatest of admiration for the people who are out there doing this research, busting their tails day in and day out. I just don't trust the people whose job it is to make sure their company is profitable--and not just profitable, but more and more and more profitable with every passing year. Wall Street is never satisfied with merely "profitable"--they want to see profits soaring higher and higher every year. That's a lot of pressure for these people to operate under, and it's probably the biggest reason that there is so much corruption within Corporate America. When you run out of ethical means to make the shareholders and the Wall Street stuffed shirts happy, you turn to the unethical and hope you don't get caught.

One of our friends works for NIH--she lives in Gaithersburg, MD. According to her, although the researchers and scientists doing the work are ethical people who really care, they are held back by funding issues. They can only research what the government tells them to research, and all too often, promising projects are shelved because the money just isn't there. Now that's the government, of course--but I don't think that a private pharm company would be all that much different. In the end, you work on the project they're willing to fund, and you shelve the ones that they aren't willing to fund--sometimes the lower level people don't even know that those unfunded projects *exist*. The only reason Liz (our friend) knows about it is because she helps to write the grant proposals. Holding the purse strings is a very powerful tool for control--as our US House of Representatives has proven many times in the past. I have a difficult time believing that a profit-driven company would refrain from using that power to squash a project that could damage profits just because it's the "right thing to do". Perhaps they are able to be ethical about it *some* of the time--but *all* of the time? Never, ever putting profit before ethics? I just cannot believe that *any* corporation is that Good.

I'm not bashing the researchers, turtlensue. I'm not saying that you're "wrong". I'm just mistrustful and suspicious of the people who tell the researchers what to do, and who choose which projects to fund, and which projects to quietly let die.

[GalleryGod]

3. To Better Days...

[malta blue]

7. I was recently diagnosed with it as well. It truly is a bear.

Maybe this will make you smile


and have some of these:
:hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug::hug:

[ThomCat]

8. I'll join in the hugs.

:grouphug:

I hope the pain subsides and you have a wonderful day. :hug: