Campfire Therapy

If you are a camper, you know how it feels to sit around a warm campfire beneath an open sky filled with stars. There is quite possibly nothing like it.

As a young girl, the Girl Scouts taught me to love camping and hiking and roasting marshmallows around the campfire. I would wrap myself in a blanket and settle into the dirt using a log for my backrest and watch the dancing flames without a care in the world.

Fibromyalgia patients should be able to do the same, but that is only IF they go camping at all. For someone in pain it's difficult to think about sleeping anywhere but in the comfort of their own home, the familiarity of their own bed and without easy access a myriad of items most of us never think about.

Adrienne Dellwo writes a great column about Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome on About.com. Today's column is about camping and since my daughter is camping this weekend I thought the timing was serendipitous.

Ms. Dellwo creates a checklist for campers with fibro, reminding us of the little things that can be so easily forgotten - a soft sleeping bag rather than an itchy or lumpy one that could irritate, non-chemical based bug repellent since chemicals can wreak havoc on many fibro patients, etc.

It's a fairly comprehensive list, the old adage "everything but the kitchen sink" may apply here, but once you are finally settled in and sitting beside that fire - no matter how many layers you have on - there is still nothing that compares to being outdoors beneath a star-filled sky.

Happy camping! And you may not want to take the kitchen sink, but don't forget the medicine cabinet!