Case Studies

Below are 2 case studies from previous participants of the Fibromyalgia Floataion Project.

Tina

Brigitta

Tina was chronically tired, bedridden much of the time and suffered pain that felt like body-wide bruising. It hurt to have any one touch her. She was depressed and anxious, unable to work and continually stressed about providing for her two young sons. The doctors of the National Health Service (Tina resides in the UK) could not tell her what was wrong with her. Finally, in 2001 Tina was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by a private rheumatologist outside Britain’s socialized medicine system. Her fibromyalgia was linked to a serious car accident in 1998 in which she suffered a significant whiplash injury.

Fibromyalgia is a devastating and often unpredictable condition that causes dreadful pain and impacts life by interfering with the ability to do the simplest things. It led to Tina losing her friends, her job, and her ability to enjoy life. She had to consider her fibromyalgia at all times and continually try to adjust her life to it, always anticipating some new symptom, new pain, or flare up of the familiar pains.
Tina was unsuccessfully trying to control the searing pains throughout her body with a prescribed cocktail of diazepam, naproxen, ibuprofen gel, tramadol and Fentanyl patches. After a near fatal overdose of Fentanyl convinced her to try another approach, she decided to visit friends in Phoenix, Arizona. She had been struggling to do graduate work in psychology and had become interested in deep states of relaxation and healing. She had read about flotation REST as a way of achieving Theta brain states and was interested in trying it at a float center near her friends.

In using this type of therapy one is given a private room with a shower where one can disrobe, shower, and step into the pool enclosure. After sitting in the water and lying back to float on the surface, one can then turn out the lights. At 43 years old, Tina tried her first float and described entering the pool as being “like stepping into a warmth that was hard to describe. I felt held, secure, safe, enveloped and surrounded by this wonderful water that was so good to feel against my painful body. I had immediate pain relief and no breakthrough pain for 17 hours after my first float.

After that first experience Tina tried to float every 2 weeks, but back in the UK she had to travel 55 miles to the nearest facility so sometimes it was less frequent. After seven floats she estimated that her pain overall was reduced by about 90 percent and felt that, if she were able to float more regularly, the pain would be down to nothing because the relief seemed to be cumulative. With each float, Tina experienced progressively deeper relaxation as well as longer lasting pain relief.

Gradually she was able to hang on to this relaxed feeling in her daily activities, which allowed her to be more objective about her pain when it returned. Now that her symptoms are minimal for long periods, Tina, who is working to finish her Ph.D. in psychology, feels that flotation is allowing her to do introspective work on the psychological causes of her pain and enabling her to see fibromyalgia as an extension of stressors in her life.

Brigitta, a Swedish participant in the first Fibromyalgia Flotation Project, had such a positive experience with the three float session of that study that she decided to continue float sessions on her own. She had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia at 45 years old but had had much pain for many years before that. The pain was in her neck, shoulders, legs and back. She also frequently suffered from dizziness and had very little energy to do much of anything. Over the years she tried a variety of treatments. Pain medications did not agree with her stomach so she had physical therapy, warm baths and exercise. At one point her symptoms improved after three weeks at a Rehabilitation Center. Unfortunately, the National Health Service of Sweden wouldn’t cover more than that so she regressed again. Acupuncture was also an effective treatment but again the funding for that disappeared.

Brigitta was 70 years old when the Fibromyalgia Flotation Project recruited her. After her flotation experience, her pain was considerably less and her mood was much improved. She reported the she “felt much better both in my body and my soul.” She continued to float once a week for five more months and then cut down to every third week as that seemed all that was necessary to keep her pain in check. At age 72 she is floating once a month and will continue to do so as long as it keeps her feeling so good. She says the pain is not completely gone but is significantly less and she has many days without pain at all. “Flotation,” she says, “has made my life considerably better. I feel that it’s easier for me to take each day as it comes, which means that life gets easier. I feel much more positive and happy, and many of my friends confirm that.”

Case studies courtesy of Fibromyalgia Flotation Project