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Dercums Disease - What is it? Imagine, if you will, that you are a healthy
woman (but not meaning to exclude men) going about your daily life, doing what
we all do, performing our jobs, chores and everything else that makes for an
active and enjoyable life. Then one day, lumps start to appear for no apparent
reason. Or perhaps lumps you have had for some time start to grow and become
uncomfortable. Then pain and discomfort starts in the general vicinity of those
lumps. You start to really get concerned. Are they cancer? What's going on? Being a responsible person, and knowing and
believing the value of early detection in any disease, you head off to the
doctor. Because the lumps and pains first appeared in the abdominal region, the
consensus is that it's a gastro-intestinal problem. So you are poked and
prodded and tubes are shoved into openings from your mouth to your anus,
searching for the cause - polyps, tumors, cancer. And nothing is found. That specialist can't help you, and you are
shuffled off to another, maybe an endocrinologist, who does more tests and
can't find anything. Maybe it's psychosomatic he/she says. I don't know of any
disease like this. What did YOU do to cause it, is the usual question. So from doctor to doctor you go, with doctors
not having a clue what you have and now prescribing this and that for the pain.
If they can't find the cause, they will try to alleviate the pain. Or put you
through a grueling battery of tests, which end up excluding this and that.
Finally, if you are lucky, you find a doctor who goes beyond the mundane and
researches the literature (or recalls a previous patient with a similar
problem) and the diagnosis of Dercum's Disease is made. This is Dercum's Disease (also Dercum Disease
or Adiposis Dolorosa), first identified by Francis X. Dercum, a neurologist in
Pennsylvania, in 1892, and bears his name. The disease is characterized by
painful fatty tumors and/or fatty deposits. The tumors can be encapsulated or
the fatty deposits can be diffuse. Please
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