Advice on claiming PIP for fibromyalgia?

labrador68

Hi
Starting to go for PIP for my fibromyalgia.
Any advice?

JennysDad

Hello @labrador68, and welcome to the community. Good to have you with us.
You'll find a lot of material on here regarding PIP - have a look through the links (in white on a purple background, lower down the page) and have a look in particular at this one, 'Talk about PIP/DLA' 
https://community.scope.org.uk/categories/talk-about-pip-dla
Let us know how you get on  and don't hesitate to ask any further questions you may have.
Warmest best wishes to you
Richard

mikehughescq

Fibromyalgia is not accepted as a real thing by around 50% of medical professionals so you have that barrier to surmount in the first place. This is because whilst some medical professional insist it is a "thing" of itself, most believe that it's a collection of symptoms given a label when differential diagnosis cannot come up with another explanation.

Starting from the assumption it's definitely a thing means you risk being viewed as lacking credibility to begin with.

However, the bigger issue with fibro claims is that people tend to err on the side of saying how difficult it is to explain instead of being very specific about which points they should get and why. Focus on regs 4 and 7 and not how hard it is to explain. That goes nowhere fast. All conditions are unique and our experience of them is also unique to us. All conditions are variable and again that's not unique to fibro. None of these things should make it hard to identify which points and why.

These regs are about the fact that needing help more than 50% of the time means you need help, and, that things you cannot do reliably, repeatedly, safely or in a reasonable time... can be recorded as things you cannot do.

Sam_Alumni

Hi @labrador68
There is a PIP self test you can take so you can see the questions and see how your impairment and the way it effects you scores on the PIP test.