Hi Jimjam, your snippet and
@fimi's explanation are at the moment the leading hypothesis about the cause and explanation of fibro, the one calling it a form of "central sensitisation". Others are the autoimmune or small fibre neuropathy or AV-shunt explanations. Seeing a similarity to conditions like ME/CFS and TMJ they decided that these seem steered by the CNS and so associated them as "central sensitisation syndromes" (CSS).
Your snippet put it in a bad & wrong way - for many reasons. So I very much understand you feel confused by it.
(There's lots of rubbish floating about, torn out of context. So best to keep to good resources.)
For one: All the the above explanations say it
is physical, and not mental. Although stress and trauma can contribute to the physical sensation and may trigger the FM or a flare. So if it's neurological, as they assume, it
is physical.
What they mean is that docs and researchers cannot find any injury as a cause, neither tissue nor nerve injury, so it's neither of the two traditional pain types (nociceptive and neuropathic). This had lead them to talk about centralized or centrally sensitized pain and introduce the concept of nociplastic pain. In that sense the snippet is sort of right:
It may be neurological (thus also physical).
But is it? What if the other explanations prove to be better? What if each is only a part?
I have severe fibromyalgia, but I have no amplified pain (hyperalgesia), no pain from touch (allodynia), no low pain threshold, no high pain sensitivity = I have a fairly high pain tolerance. These are all things that these CSS studies are describing about us. So the hypothesis may apply to some sorts of FM, it definitely doesn't apply to mine.
So does it "affect the sensory processing system" as the snippet says? "My body" is overloaded by pain and other symptoms, visible to my wife, even if I try to ignore it. Just because they haven't found the real reason yet, researchers have no better idea than that it's just wrong
signals. My wife would laugh her head off... (OK, I'll ask her.
.)
What about the snippet saying fibromyalgia is
no inflammation or damage to the
joints?
Well: there is no
traditional form of inflammation or damage provable. (Whether joints or what I think: the tendons around them.)
But there are researchers checking whether it may be in some other way inflammatory or autoimmune or the immune system.
Also I personally am not sure if they just haven't found the type of inflammation or damage yet, because it's a new sort. Not a new sort of pain, a new sort of inflammation or damage.
Also fibromyalgia is
not just widespread
pain, it also means we have
severe further symptoms like fatigue, gut problems, unrestful sleep, fog etc., to varying extents. The explanation and the snippet ignore that completely.
And lastly the snippet suggests that
brain imaging proves that it is a disorder of the central nervous system.
Wrong:
Nothing has proven that yet. It's still a hypothesis (I can quote research on that). Some say it's coming close to a theory.
Brain imaging may be showing to a certain extent that the central nervous system is in
a disorder. (See
@tormodg's video post.)
But to claim that this is a definition or even a good fairly complete way of seeing fibro is exaggerating and simplifying.
Brain imaging may show a certain amount of differences, but neither whether if that is a cause, an effect, a biomarker or a symptom. (Not sure if symptom is the right word there.)
To repeat my answer to your main question: Even if it were neurological, even if it shows up on images, that proves it
is physical.
What they are trying to say is just that
there is no tissue or nerve damage (provable).
The only one that's helped me a little was the autoimmune one, altho that turned out partly misleading.