Sounds Like Weird
15 May 2014
Posting this because that occasional random pains you may have may respond to this technique. Myofascial pain is chronic inflammation where a nerve enters a muscle, but you can have acute pain from temporary inflammation. If you have a random sore muscle, it probably wouldn’t hurt to look up the trigger point and see if rubbing there would help.
Tuesday, I had an appointment with the pain doc. One of the things I have to do is a pain check, recording all my pain. I happened to gently grab my upper arm—and yelped.
Most of my upper arm, on a line roughly tip-of-shoulder-blade to outer-point-of-elbow, was incredibly sore, and along that line. Not, you know, where I’d normally touch my arm.
Myofascial pain is experienced in a different location from where the source of the pain actually is. The source is, as a general rule, closer to the spine and often closer to the head. I visited triggerpoints.net and found the page that showed where I was experiencing my pain.
The pain maps to the A on that page, which shows several trigger points on the scalene muscles. I feel with my fingers for the inflamed lump of muscle I’ve learned that corresponds to a trigger point, and pain starts shooting down my arm in the area where I felt the pain earlier. Bingo!
Note that this is one of those places you have to be really careful about: you can use a lot of pressure in some places, but not this one. There’s an artery right there, so you can safely use only gentle finger pressure.
Then, because I have fibro and the shooting pains irritated one of my fibro tender points, later I get another reoccurrence of the shooting pain, which kept me awake Tuesday night. 🙁
I woke up with incredibly, unbelievably sore shoulders after sleeping 9 hours, so it must have been good. It’s like relieving a bit of tension in that one spot happened to cause all other nearby muscles to have to renegotiate their place in the world.