Can Drinking Alcohol Actually Ease Fibromyalgia Pain?

Published: // Updated: March 13, 2021

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Can drinking alcohol can help relieve fibromyalgia pain and symptom severity? In this guest post, journalist Stephen Bitsoli explains what the research says about drinking alcohol when you have fibromyalgia.

Can Drinking Alcohol Actually Ease Fibromyalgia Pain?Pin

To Drink or Not to Drink: Conflicting Findings on Fibromyalgia and Alcohol

Guest Post by Stephen Bitsoli

Fibromyalgia patients have to give up a lot in the way of diet, including caffeine, sugar, sometimes gluten, and alcohol. So it must have seemed like good news when separate reports – one in March 2013, the other in July 2015, both found that people with fibromyalgia who drank moderately suffered less pain than those who didn’t drink at all. But it’s not necessarily so.

The conventional wisdom has been that “Most people who have fibromyalgia… find that they can no longer drink much, if any, alcohol,” according to an article on HealthCentral. “While a few are able to occasionally have one or two drinks with only minimal problems, for others even a very small alcoholic beverage can trigger a severe flare or relapse that may last for days, weeks or sometimes even months.” Such disincentives mean few fibromyalgia patients need to spend time in alcohol treatment facilities; it’s difficult to drink enough to discover you’re an alcoholic.

But the 2013 study of 950 patients with fibromyalgia, conducted by The Mayo Clinic and The University of Michigan, found that “Low and moderate drinkers had better scores for physical function, ability to work, the number of workdays missed, fatigue and pain, than people who abstained. Moderate drinkers who had between three and seven standard drinks a week seemed to have less pain than low or heavy drinkers, even when the results were controlled for confounding factors. Similar results were seen for the quality of life scale including social functioning, vitality and general health.” The results were adjusted for age, employment status, education level, body mass index, and opioid use.

The 2015 study of 2200 people with chronic widespread pain (CWP) – how many had fibromyalgia was unclear – conducted by Scottish researchers in the United Kingdom, found “moderate to heavy drinkers experiencing less disability” from pain. Those drinking between 15 and 20 beers or 10 and 15 glasses of wine weekly “were 67 percent less likely than those who never drink to experience disability.” (Well, I guess that’s moderate for the U.K. In the U.S., that might suggest a stay in alcohol treatment facilities.)

But before you reach for that six-pack, many doctors question whether medicating with alcohol is the right approach. And even the studies’ authors aren’t sure what it means.

Dr. Terry Oh, the leader of the 2013 study, speculated that alcohol may bind to the GABA receptor and block pain transmission, or the reduced pain may simply “be due to improved mood, socialization, and tension.”

But Marcus Beasley, one of the authors of the 2015 study, denied that it proved “that alcohol helps people with pain or not. My guess is that drinking alcohol is an indicator of good health – people drink to the extent that their health allows them, and they reduce their alcohol intake to the extent that they are prone to ill-health and pain.” With that in mind, he concludes that it would be “unwise” to advise someone with pain problems to take a drink.

Drinking alcohol to ease pain is questionable from another perspective: tolerance. If you drink a lot, you have to keep increasing how much you drink to achieve the same effect. This can lead to dependence, addiction and prolonged visits to alcohol treatment facilities.

Another problem is interaction with medications. Patients with fibromyalgia also may be on painkillers and antidepressants, most of which should not be taken with alcohol. Even acetaminophen (Tylenol) has an increased risk of liver damage when combined with alcohol.

Fibromyalgia’s symptoms are often aggravated by food sensitivities, including alcohol, which might make the cure worse than the disease. But not all fibromyalgia patients are sensitive to the same foods, and most food sensitivities affect fatigue and irritable bowel symptoms, not pain.

As with most health-related news, there’s too little research to come to a firm conclusion. If you’re suffering from fibromyalgia pain and don’t drink, and you aren’t taking any medications that make alcohol contraindicated, you might consider giving it a try.

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Can Drinking Alcohol Actually Ease Fibromyalgia Pain?Pin

Have you noticed a difference in your ability to tolerate alcohol? Does drinking alcohol help ease your fibromyalgia pain or does it trigger a flare-up?

Author BIO

Stephen Bitsoli writes about addiction and related subjects. A journalist for more than 20 years, and a lifelong avid reader, Stephen loves learning and sharing what he’s learned.

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7 thoughts on “Can Drinking Alcohol Actually Ease Fibromyalgia Pain?”

  1. I do enjoy a glass of red wine occasionally, and I find that it does help some. The only thing is that my pain killers tell me not to imbibe. Sometimes however, when I’m in severe pain and it seems nothing is helping, I’ve been known to take a shot of hard liqueur. This is rarely though.

    Reply
  2. I disagree. Since contracting fibromyalgia, I have had severe reactions to alcohol (the slightest quantity of beer, wine or spirits caused a fibro-flare that put me into bed for several days). Now, twenty something years on, I have to avoid places where other people are drinking – the exhaled beer fumes in a bar, or the aroma of a carafe of red wine will do the same thing. Does anybody else share my problem?

    Reply
    • Hi, Kenn. It has been so long since I have been in a bar that I forget that the smell could make me feel sick. Especially the smell of beer. And that was a long time before I was even diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

      Reply
  3. My pain and body function is vastly improved by drinking 1-2 pints of beer a day. I cant tell you how much it improves my quality of life. It takes about a week of moderate drinking to have the full effect and I must be busy doing things- working etc. If I dont do anything my fitness goes down and because a sedentary life is bad anyway i have got really unfit when drinking everyday – however my fibromyalgia pains plus my CPPS pains would still go. Make sure to not over do the drinking. Don’t drink wine and spirits. Keep busy as you are able. It works for me.

    Reply
  4. I find that my beer intolerance was due to gluten intolerance but I also find that hard liquor versus wine seems to ease my pain

    Reply
    • Beer has always made me feel sick. I don’t like the taste of it either. I could handle hard liquor when I was younger but not anymore. I quit drinking alcohol altogether because I never knew how it was going to affect me even in small amounts.

      Reply

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