Anyone with Chronic Myofascial Pain?

Hi Crampygrammy,

I have chronic myofascial pain. Though not in my leg. Mine is in myback and neck.

I did try PT and didn't get any relief with it. I do get some relief with muscle relaxers and trigger point injections.

You are right though they can be awful.

I started with TMJ, left untreated for most of my life I guess, then came Fibro, then came MPS… I guess any of these left untreated/unrelieved will potentially lead to the rest! Now I apparently have spine issues, and it makes me wonder if that is all caused by the items listed above…

As for the MPS - I had about 30% of my right leg covered with marble sized knots, a section on the top of my right forearm has about 25 or so pea sized knots. I guess these are called trigger points? I also get these in the arches of both feet.

I can't tolerate massage due to the FMS - I tried multiple practitioners before finally giving up. Chiropractic caused me to start having facial pain over and above the TMJD. I did PT as well, which really only helped me with ergonomics. I started on Gabapentin this Summer to help with the nerve pain from the FMS - it made is so that not everything hurt from the waist down, which is what led to me discovering the leg and feet issue, because that pain was still there. Once I start exploring/self-massage I discovered the knots/TrPs.

For the feet and forearm, so far I just use heat and massage. I apply heat to relax the muscles, then I apply Voltaren gel to the area, wait about 20-30 minutes and then proceed with self-massage, then reapply heat. This has actually worked pretty well for me, though in the beginning it was really tough, and I had to force myself to work at the knots. Now they are pretty manageable as long as i do the massage several times a week.

For the leg, I never could get to the point where I could work the knots effectively. I think I just caused myself a lot of unnecessary pain! I finally got the PMD to agree to trigger point injections (plus she threw in some last minute prolotherapy) and so far I've gotten great relief. I think it's just been 6 weeks since the injections, it took about two weeks for the worst of the pain to subside.

I will be 43 next month… I almost wish I were 63 so I could blame my pain and general falling apart on age! It's funny, but in the past few months I have started taking extremely good care of my skin, first my face, and décolletage. I was starting to get some serious pain lines between my brows and on my forehead. My eyes were just starting to wrinkle… I got rid of about 75% of my wrinkles and am still working on the rest.

This seemed unrelated to my pain until just recently, when I realized that I was gaining some sense of control of my life by improving my skin/appearance. j

A bonus to this is that people were suddenly telling me that I must have finally got the pain under control and was feeling better… depending on the person, I just let them believe it!

Hello Jinch & welcome to the chronic pain forum. Trix has not been to Healing Well in months so we have no idea how she is doing.

We do ask all new members to make a separate intro post so all members will see it & be able to say hello & welcome aboard. By posting on this older thread not many members will see your post.

I will lock this thread so others will not post here. Thanks.