My migraines started when I was about seven. EEGs, allergy tests, the works. Nothing was found. The solution, courtesy of the German healthcare system, was a string of ER trips and pain shots over the next ten-plus years. When I was 16, my body shifted from migraines to stomach issues. Diarrhea, acid reflux, horrible heartburn.

That was the first silo. It wasn’t the last.

Twenty-Five Years of Silos

In 1992 I moved to the US and the pain got worse. At first it looked like carpal tunnel syndrome. Then a rheumatologist diagnosed me with fibromyalgia and handed me a prescription for antidepressants. I had no idea what fibromyalgia even was, and nobody explained why someone in pain was being treated for depression. I flushed the antidepressants down the toilet.

In 2010 I asked for a second opinion. The expert confirmed fibromyalgia. By then I had done my own research and adjusted my life around it. A few years later, in Northern California, a rheumatologist affiliated with Stanford got me into their fibromyalgia research. In 2017, after moving to San Diego, a friend swore by low dose naltrexone. I asked a doctor about it, got a prescription, and it worked.

Do the math. Roughly 25 years passed between moving to the US and finding something that actually helped. And the answer came from my own research and a friend, not a specialist.

Meanwhile, the rest of my body kept filing complaints with other departments. Period pain that always sucked. Reflux that woke me up choking on acid. IBS I can only control by being strict about food. Headaches so frequent I stopped counting. Joints that bent in ways that freaked people out. Antidepressant after antidepressant, none of which worked consistently or for long.

Prescriptions got written. Causes never got investigated.

The Pattern Nobody Saw

Here is what I wish someone had noticed.

My unusually high pain tolerance. When a doctor asks me to rate my pain from 1 to 10, I’m guessing. What is a 9 for others probably registers as a 5 for me. A bad pain day hardly registers anymore. That is not the absence of pain. That is decades of tuning it out so I could function.

The bruises I could never explain. The attention span that went missing. How sensitive I was to everything around me.

Every single one of those was a signal. In my world, that is called a pattern, and missing a pattern that obvious would get you fired. In medicine, it got me a refill.

One GP Who Listened

Then I moved back to Germany, and within three months my GP connected the dots. He didn’t diagnose me himself. He did something more radical. He listened to me, and then he sent me to an acute psychosomatic clinic for testing. They confirmed ADHD. A year later, during psychosomatic rehab, autism was confirmed too.

Decades of specialists got me nowhere. One GP who listened got me somewhere in three months.

Then My Fraud Brain Kicked In

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across the claimed connection between chronic pain, chronic fatigue, and neurodivergence. The latest was a webinar invite this week, claiming that up to 80% of adults with chronic pain and invisible illnesses screen positive for unrecognized ADHD or autistic traits.

My first reaction was “finally.” My second was the one twenty years in fraud prevention trained into me: show me the data.

I couldn’t find a single study that says 80%. A small study in Argentina found that 73% of fibromyalgia patients tested positive for adult ADHD. A 2026 study from Brighton found that up to 70% of adults with chronic pain or fatigue met screening criteria for autism or ADHD, and were about 14 times more likely to screen positive for autism than a healthy group. But the largest study, 958 patients across pain centers in Japan, found 17.1% for ADHD and 4.4% for autism. Still about 2.4 times the general population, and it jumped to 27.4% among patients in the most extreme pain.

Here is how my fraud brain reads that. Small samples produce dramatic numbers. The biggest sample produces a smaller number that is still significant. All of these studies used screening questionnaires, not formal diagnoses. The link is real. The 80% is a headline. And if even one in six people walking into a pain clinic has an unrecognized ADHD brain, that is a lot of people getting the wrong treatment for the wrong reason.

What the Research Says About My Pattern

Once I started digging, every item on my list showed up.

Fibromyalgia now falls under what’s called nociplastic pain, where the central nervous system amplifies pain signals even when there is no injury to explain them. A brain that processes sound, light, texture, and emotion at maximum volume doesn’t suddenly turn the dial down for pain. Researchers suspect dopamine plays a role, and that the relationship runs both ways. ADHD makes pain worse, and pain makes ADHD worse. I live that loop. A stressful day overloads my senses until I hit a wall, and in that state everything gets harder: the fatigue, the sensitivity, the patience for people who talk loudly and say nothing.

The old belief that autistic people don’t feel pain doesn’t hold up. The reality is messier. In the lab, many autistic people have normal pain thresholds, but once pain kicks in, they feel it more intensely. In real life, it’s all over the map. Some of us tune pain out so completely that it barely registers, hence the bruises you don’t remember getting. For some of us, it may not be that we feel less. We just process and express it differently, and the people around us read that as not hurting. Others feel everything at full volume. My husband is firmly in that camp. Very few of us fit what a clinician expects, and that is exactly why a 1 to 10 scale has never worked for me, and why clinicians who only know one half of the picture misread both.

My bendy joints weren’t a party trick. The Brighton team found 51% of adults with a formal neurodevelopmental diagnosis were hypermobile, compared to about 20% of the general population. A Swedish study found neurodivergent women were five times more likely to experience widespread pain than neurotypical women. Painful periods, IBS, migraines, fibromyalgia, all show up more often in autistic adults.

Migraines, fibromyalgia, IBS, reflux, painful periods, hypermobility. I have pretty much the whole list, and every item on it was treated by a different doctor in a different silo.

The Pattern Was Always There

The bruises I couldn’t explain weren’t a mystery. They were a clue. The antidepressants that never worked weren’t a treatment failure. They were a signal pointing somewhere nobody looked.

It took decades of silos to get me nowhere. It took one GP who listened three months to get me somewhere.

That is not a fluke. That is what happens when someone finally looks at the whole picture instead of the loudest complaint in the room.

I’m not a doctor, and nothing here is medical advice. Please talk to your own healthcare provider before changing anything about your treatment.