Fibromyalgia is Real! Finally Gets It's Own ICD Code

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The Health Care Industry Finally Recognizes Fibromyalgia by Ginevra Liptan, MD

“How can you say fibromyalgia is real when it doesn’t even have its own diagnosis code?”​

On October 1, 2015, fibromyalgia will finally be recognized as an official diagnosis in the new ICD-10 list of codes being adopted across the U.S. This is the final culmination of the advances over the last decade in the medical community’s understanding and acceptance of fibromyalgia as a real disease.

For the past 30 years, every U.S. hospital and doctor’s office has used the ICD-9 list of codes to indicate a diagnosis for all patient encounters. This list does not include a specific diagnosis code for fibromyalgia. Instead doctors have had to use the code “Myalgia and myositis, unspecified (729.1),” which includes any disorder causing muscle pain or inflammation......In the new system, fibromyalgia finally gets its own diagnostic code: “Fibromyalgia (M79.7).”

This is a huge bureaucratic stamp of approval that legitimizes fibromyalgia as a real, distinct entity. It will make winning a disability case for fibromyalgia easier. A few years ago, I was testifying in support of one of my patients, and the opposing lawyer said to me, “How can you say fibromyalgia is real when it doesn’t even have its own diagnosis code?”

Read more here: http://nationalpainreport.com/the-health-care-industry-finally-recognizes-fibromyalgia-8827637.html