I’ll look into it, or some kind of pain-management clinic, eventually. But it sounds like it costs money, therefore it’s out of the question. At the moment I’m just two months into a full-time job after being out of full-time work for almost a year and it’s at a shoestring operation of a law firm (another lawyer, me, and a secretary) and it will be a few months yet before we can even talk about health benefits.
I sidePit anyone who doesn’t want America to have a universal health coverage system delinked from individual employment. May your troubles one day soon be far, far worse than mine.
Since you first started this thread to today, my every-minute-of-every-day pain has moved into all new places on my body (my toes? really?). Doctors still don’t know why - I think they are guessing now.
Long term use of opiates messes up your memory. Fun.
Okay, you are not going to like this, but you have to do it:
Suck it up, and try some “woo”.
I had chronic pain until some one massaged my muscles to re-align the … I forget what, but it worked. “Western” biochemistry-based medicine just does not deal well with (chronic) pain. Find a mechanism for tapping the use of the “placebo effect”.
That’s just it, though…I suspect Brain’s been a Doper too long to easily glom onto something that’ll really ping the placebo effect. You gotta believe it’s gonna help…or at least that it might.
My partner swears by acupuncture; it worked like mad for her muscle spasms, more than once. Pretty sure it wouldn’t do a damn thing for me.
In my (direct, personal) experience - no, you don’t. I certainly did not “believe” in the technique that alleviated my pain (not as severe as the people in this thread experience). I expected temporary relief from a skilled massage therapist, to last overnight to a couple of days. I have not experienced pain in the region since the day of treatment, over a decade ago.
The placebo effect is real; we just don’t know how to use it yet. That doesn’t bother me, because we went centuries without understanding the biochemical basis of medicine, but willow bark tisanes still alleviated pain and reduced fever.
I’m not saying my massage therapy is the cure for what ails you, but I am saying there are mechanisms we do not understand that are effective, and chronic pain sufferers should explore them. (From my relatively brief experience, I have some minor understanding of how they suffer, and offer this as a possible means of relief.)
BrainGlutton I read the whole thing. I am sorry that you are still suffering so much.
This isn’t woo, this is something that ophthalmologists often recommend for ocular migraines. Take a couple of Benadryl and use cold on your head. What you want to achieve is vascular restriction in your brain. Its overheating and all of your gears are grinding.
I know that what is going on for you isn’t the same, but maybe this might help.
I will tell you that I used to have serious migraine problems before I learned about this. Our bodies are individual machines and we all need to deal with them differently. It is possible that your machine might respond to what works for my machine, or I might just be full of what makes the grass grow.
I’m new to these boards and I’ve already seen that your reputation is richly deserved. Dude, you’ve got more venom inside you than a gross of rattlesnakes. And this seems to be your chosen location to spew it.
I’m sure you have some richly and lovingly constructed rationale for doing what you do. I’m also sure that some kind of cognitive dissonance helps you conclude that you’re just a misunderstood lil’ ol’ teddy bear.
(Now bracing for personal attack in response, followed by raving)
Like Clinton, I feel your pain. Maybe not your precise pain but your experience. I was recently hospitalized with severe sciatica and although I’m home now, the pain’s only been somewhat modulated. I have a particular fear of chronic back pain since my mother had sciatica for the entire 41 years I knew her, and her life was lousy because of it.
I agree that medication remedies have their own problems, including side effects that can be almost as bad as the pain. Plus, they don’t work all that well unless you’re willing to render yourself otherwise useless and/or slowly poison yourself.
What has worked for me to some extent is distraction. Do something you enjoy. Eat something you like. Watch a good movie. Listen to some music. Above all, if you can, laugh. Laughter has documented analgesic effects.
And yes, pain sucks, and while it has obvious survival aspects, we don’t really need to be told for the 10,000th time, “Hey, damage in this area” by our bodies. But suffering isn’t maladaptive, so suffering features prominently in our genetic programming. It sucks to be human.
I just hope you don’t give up. I don’t have these issues and am more or less a regular guy (who suffers in other ways anyway), so hopefully the solution doesn’t require any Star Trek level technology. Depending on your activity, it is possible to over-develop one set of muscles and not their counterparts, the effect being to pull a part of body out of whack. This can be corrected. But from here I can only make wild guesses.
Have you tried high-end prostitutes? I hear some rich people swear by 'em! Ok, that suggestion is along these lines:
BrainGlutton, apologies if this is in the thread and I missed it, but have you tried physical therapy, or even someone like a neurologist or an orthopedist? Has someone with the proper training thought through the ergonomics of your workspace?
I assume you’ve gone down all sorts of different routes by this time, and so I’m sorry if I’m belaboring the obvious, but I just figured I’d try to think of everything.
BG, I notice you’re in Florida. I hope your state passes medical marijuana–if it can help manage the pain of patients on chemo, perhaps it might be worth a try for you?
Better today, post-massage. My problem is not that the pain is so intense – it flares up and it fades, and massages usually help some – but that it never, ever entirely goes away, not for the past 10 years or more, and I’ve been having it for more than 20.
I was even hospitalized for it once!