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Show Released by Western Newspaper Union. STIFFNESS AND PAIN There are intelligent men and women who have pain or "aches" in their muscles or around joints who think that, as they approach middle age, they 2 must expect to be a I tS little stiff and con- f i a tinue to have the I 1 pains. f ',""rH What is the nature ?, V. I of the pain, stiffness I "Sro. J! and tiredness in dif- I .us., M ferent parts of the ,'1 body? ""v -' -3 It is a chronic in-K in-K J flammation of the J white fibrous tissue Dr. Barton of the body and hence is called fibro-sitis. fibro-sitis. White fibrous tissue is found where there is no "stretching" of the tissues, thus being unlike muscle mus-cle tissue which stretches and relaxes re-laxes like elastic. This white fibrous tissue forms the tendons which attach at-tach muscles to bones, it covers the muscles themselves, it forms ligaments liga-ments around joints, covers bones, and covers the tissues under the skin keeping them in firm bundles. It could almost be described as a hard covering for the tissues. It can thus be understood why the pain can be practically anywhere any-where in the body and why it was formerly called muscular rheumatism. rheuma-tism. What causes the inflammation of this fibrous covering tissue? Just as other tissues muscles, nerves, blood vessels can become infected, so can this fibrous tissue. And it can also be caused by other infections in the body due to injury, rheumatic fever, gout and influenza. The most frequent fre-quent places affected by the inflammation inflam-mation are in the muscles and the fibrous tissue about a joint. In the "muscular" type there is lumbago, stiff neck, pleurodynia and I pain in the thin muscular layer covering cov-ering the skull. In the "joint" type of fibrositis pain is "about" the joint andv the patient naturally thinks it is "in" the joint. Morning stiffness is the commonest com-monest symptom, as patient is extremely ex-tremely stiff and may require considerable con-siderable movement before stiffness disappears. There is usually no swelling present. In the Mayo Clinic's issue of Medical Medi-cal Clinics of North America, Dr. Frank H. Krusen, whose description of fibrositis is mentioned above, states that the best treatment for fibrositis during or after the removal of infection is heavy massage which breaks down hard nodules or lumps of tissue and further treatment is by heat, special friction massage, and stretching. This is an ailment where a qualified quali-fied physiotherapist or masseur can obtain excellent results. |