What Causes Fibro Fog?

Fibro fog, or problems with poor memory and lack of mental clarity, is a common complaint of my patients. I often get email questions about what to do or what causes fibro fog, so I thought I’d share a past weekly Treating and Beating Teleconference. You can read the partial transcript below or listen to the entire conference below.

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Tonight, what we’re talking about is fibro fog. In fibro fog, you find that you have problems recalling known words. You typically use the incorrect words, you can’t remember people’s names, you have short term memory problems like forgetfulness, inability to remember what you’ve just read and what you’ve just heard, or maybe you saw a movie last week, you don’t remember anything about it. You oftentimes have problems with directional disorientation, so you’re not able to recognize familiar surroundings; get lost, it’s hard to read a map.

You become disoriented very quickly in a shopping mall if you’re not overwhelmed because you’ve bankrupted your stress coping chemicals, you don’t handle a lot of stress including being in a crowd. You have trouble recalling where things are; where did I put my keys, where did I put my blue socks, where did I put my towel. You have trouble with just getting your mind to click in and work correctly. You have lots of problems with multitasking. You have inability to pay attention to more than one thing.

You forget balancing a checkbook or doing any type of math, rudimentary math problems because your brain is not working and I call it the mind mush. Fibro fog, where you often are walking in a cloudy type mindset where things just don’t come together for you. You easily get distracted. Patients that are talking to me, we’re going over their health history. They’re talking about something that happened 20 years ago, has nothing to do with their health. Oftentimes when they talk to me, they will forget their spouse’s name who is sitting right next to them when they’re talking to me. “You know, what’s your name, what’s your name?” It’s this fibro fog, this cloudy thinking that is oftentimes as disabling as the pain and the fatigue. Me and my patients, when they rank the things that they want to work on when we work together in a program, oftentimes fibro fog is number one. They want to get their mental clarity back.

[download and read the full transcript here]  or Listen to the Audio Recording Below:

Special Fibro Conference: ​Tuesday, July 21st 2015