Simpson had all but given up on finding relief when, in 2004, she saw a ray of hope. She was working in the office of an anesthesiologist at Griffin Hospital in Derby, Conn., Mark Thimineur, MD, who had begun surgically implanting tiny, nerve-stimulating devices into fibromyalgia patients.
"Some of the patients could barely make it from one end of the office to the other," she recalls. After the treatment, "they had a spring in their step" and were "like a totally different person."
The treatment, known as peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS), entails implanting wire electrodes that are about 2 millimeters thick just beneath the skin of the patient's head or lower back. The electrodes, which are connected to a battery-powered stimulator, deliver a mild—and usually imperceptible—electrical current to certain nerves.
The technique is commonly used for severe back pain, leg pain, and headaches, but Dr. Thimineur is one of just a handful of doctors who use PNS to treat fibromyalgia, a poorly understood and hard-to-diagnose condition marked by widespread pain and tenderness.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved nerve stimulation for fibromyalgia (or headaches). It's considered an experimental treatment and is used only in people with near-disabling fibromyalgia who have failed to respond to other treatments.
However, up to 40% of the approximately 10 million fibromyalgia patients in the U.S. fall into that category, and if PNS proves beneficial, it could potentially help tens of thousands of people, without the side effects of prescription drugs.
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