DOCTORS DISCUSS FIBROSITIS

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27097, 21 July 1953, Page 9

DOCTORS DISCUSS FIBROSITIS

“ Disease Probably No Longer Exists ”

LONDON, July 19. Doctors and surgeons attending the British Medical Association’s conference at. Cardiff had a long discussion on fibrositis, a disease which, one expert claimed, “probably no longer exists.”

Several speakers said that, since the word had been invented in 1904, it had been wrongly applied to complaints which really originated in the spine. Dr. Talbot Rogers, a general practitioner, appealed for a lead from experts in giving a new diagnosis for use by the family doctor. “If you substitute another word for fibrositis, the patient at once sits up and takes notice, and the employer begins to wonder whether a man is really employable,” Dr. Rogers said. “Fibrositis has been a respectable diagnosis since 1904. It is accepted by everybody and has frightened nobody. “Nobody in this country was caused great alarm and despondency when it was announced that Len Hutton had fibrositis,” said Dr. Rogers, “but if the papers had stated that he was suffering from osteo-arthritis of the spine, or something of that sort, then there would have been gloon\ and despondency indeed, and we would have been looking for a new captain for England.”

Dr. J. S. Batchelor, an orthopaedic surgeon, said: “I do not believe Hutton had fibrositis. I believe he had a strain of the ligaments of the spine that caused the pain to the neck and shoulders. I do not believe in flbrositis. Most conditions called fibrositis result from abnormalities of the trunk and spinal column.” Dr. A. H. Douthwaife, a Guy’s Hospital physician, said that all common forms of alleged fibrositis, of back, neck and shoulder girdle, were derived from spinal disease or strain. Thus the great majority of diagnoses of fibrositis were wrong. “I think it is highly probable that we are discussing a disease that no longer exists,” he said.