I didn't take my own FM seriously until it turned quite narsty last year after the flu, but then my friend's RSD zoomed into stage IV and I've never even read of anything so horrid (I used to be a professor at a medical school before FM made my energy level vanish and turned my brain into mush)(i'm not a doctor so please don't expect anything like that!). I've seen a few "fringe" articles hypothesizing there might be some sort of underlying mechanisms beneath FM and RSD (usually inflammation) but anybody seriously believing they are the same is balmy. That is my humble, scientific, opinion. BALMY.