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CarterSUPhysio said...smiitty said..
Hi everyone,
I have a new un diagnosed injury and I am asking if anyone has a similar symptoms they can help me.
I just qualified for the Aussie titles surfing in Gerro and all airfares are booked so I need recovery.
I have full shoulder rotation which is good but I can't keep my arm down by my side cause the pain is excrutiating.
I only have relief when I hold my arm above my head. I have pain from inside my elbow through shoulder to my neck.
Having trouble typing this.
Saw a DR in Byron Bay cause my GP was busy, he said tendinitis which I don't believe.
Finally saw my GP, he sent me for CT on my neck which I broke back in 2000. He thinks it is coming from the nerve area from there.
Any help would be appreciated cause I just look stupid walking around with my hand up above my head and the pain is 9/10.
Sounds like a radiculopathy (pinched nerve in neck) - lifting your arm up overhead takes the 'tension' or 'strain' off your nerves as they exit your neck, hence why that is probably relieving. definately hit a physio up and medical options are for nerve sheath injection with a local anaesthetic and cortisone which can work really well, if you're cutting it fine for an event
I had this same thing last year. Going shopping while keeping my arm up above my head like a child asking teacher to go to the toilet was pretty embarrassing. It was very painful indeed - absolutely excruciating. I had a couple of weeks with not more than about 3 hrs sleep each night, and the docs had me on heavy doses of opiate painkillers which pretty quickly started to send me downhill physically. You are lucky to have had a GP who identified the problem correctly. I wasn't, so suffered for a long time. The arm above the head thing is almost diagnostic of this condition - there are few other conditions that could lead to a pattern of symptoms like this.
So I do sympathise. I also had strange sensations in my fingers, and an area of skin on the outside of my arm/shoulder just above the biceps (where a military badge indicating rank might be if you were in the army) which lacked any sensation.
Anyway, I had no treatment, basically, because by the time I saw a medic who actually knew what it was, I was on the mend anyway, and not in the mood for listening to doctors anymore. I had been told it was a rotator cuff problem and kinda suggested that I was exaggerating the pain, and the doctor didn't believe the business about relief of symptoms with lifting arm over the head... It was only when I ended up chatting to a friend of a friend who was a neurologist that he pretty instantly spotted what it was.
I found that I needed to experiment with neck positioning to get relief. Try lying down on a bed and using pillows around the neck area - VERY gently - to elongate your neck in various positions. I eventually found a couple of positions that which when I did it the symptoms got instantly better, and I got a pretty nasty-sounding click in my neck and things started slowly to get better. I still have a pretty awful crunching sound sometimes when I turn my head around, but the pain has gone.
The main problem for me was finding medical help from anyone who even remotely knew what was going on. It was only by luck that I did. I was pretty much besides myself with pain, and the painkillers only took the edge off rather than solved the problem, and they brought problems of their own, like constipation etc. It was a good lesson for me in how one simple little injury can lead to a quick downward spiral. After 3 weeks of pain I finally went to work - more out of boredom and desperation than anything - and the look on the faces of my colleagues when they saw me was quite shocking. They could see how debilitated I had become in a very short time, and I had lost a lot of fitness through sheer inactivity and not wanting to eat, and extraordinary sleep deprivation - which really messes with your mind (so do the opiate painkillers).
Anyway, I hope you fare better than I did. In my case it was something to do with C5 I think. I can't say how the treatments might help because I didn't get any. But I think that I started to get on the mend through very careful neck stretching like I described above. And it would have helped a lot to have heard from other people who had this condition because at the time it see seemed to me that it was never going to improve, and it was hugely frustrating to be told it was a rotator cuff problem when it was obvious to me it wasn't.
Good luck mate!
PS: if you have a high tolerance for medical jargon, here's an article that may help.
www.aafp.org/afp/2010/0101/p33.htmlBut basically what it says is that it's all jolly complex and there are few treatments that have been proved to work. My advice, above all else, is to try to stay as active as you can - without of course exacerbating the symptoms. You might feel like a dummy walking around with your arm in the air, but it's better than sitting around being miserable with your whole body withering away through lack of activity. Be VERY gentle with your neck, but mobilising it might help - you'll know when you are doing the right thing because the pain will decrease pretty immediately. But I'm just a sufferer not a doctor, so if this conflicts with the medical advice you've been given then of course go with what the professionals say instead.
E T
> 9 months ago, 20 Jan 2016
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