Standard disclaimer: I am soliciting intriguing speculation about an odd medical thing, not diagnosis.
Two months ago I developed a deep, burning, throbbing pain in my back underneath the scapular area. The doc put me on muscle relaxers, which did next to nothing. Next, we did Toradol for a week. The Toradol eased the pain down to just a dull ache that was livable. We did some cardiac tests to make sure it wasn’t referred pain.
Last week I developed a sore throat, fever, swollen glands, and my joints felt as if they were breaking off, I was in so much pain. I ended up in the ER where they ran a CBC and Lyme’s Disease tests – everything clear, so they adjudged it a bacterial infection and sent me on my way with antibiotics.
I’ve finished the antibiotics and I feel GREAT. Not only have the flu/sore throat/aches gone away, but the persistent pain in my back is gone. Completely gone – I haven’t taken a painkiller for a week. The tendonitis in my right foot has also eased and I just feel comfy all over.
I’m 43, very active in kayaking/biking/gardening when I feel good (which the horrible shoulder pain has curbed recently).
Why would, if indeed it’s not just a coincidence or placebo effect, the antibiotics knock out the shoulder pain, which all the experts insisted was a pulled muscle?
They wouldn’t. You have an alien parasite in your brain which is giving you a false sense of well-being. The mothership will be here for you in a week.
(Honestly, you probably had a muscle pull or nerve pinch, which cleared up over time while you were dealing with the flu.)
I will gladly hop aboard any alien mothership if I feel this good!
Probably is a coincidence, but except for working I had basically been flat on my back with the shoulder pain for two months and by day two of the “Z Pak” for the flu the back pain was completely gone (I had stopped taking Toradol a few days before, as it’s kinda dangerous to take for more than five days).
It sounds like they treated you for Lyme Disease which is good. You don’t want to get that. I just got over the flu and that just has to run it’s course as it is a virus. Sounds like you pulled a muscle in your shoulder but all three were unrelated.
Antibiotics won’t help shoulder pain or with the flu. They are given if Lyme Disease is suspected. My Dad got the bulls eye rash after a tick bite. He went on antibiotics for a month or two and was fine.
According to some television show I watched once, we can probably rule out Lupus. Of course, once you assume that it’s never Lupus, it turns out to be Lupus.
I just realized that I have absolutely no idea what lupus actually is, so off to wikipedia. And congrats on your seeming recovery.
I read that some antibiotics are also painkillers, and that this complicates figuring out if doctors treated an ailment correctly. Did the antibiotics stop an infection, or was something temporarily wrong and it stopped hurting because of the antibiotics and meanwhile cleared up? In other words, getting better by taking antibiotics doesn’t prove an infection, as sometimes they fix mild sprains too.
Did you ever get a chest XRay?
Maybe you had a chest infection which the anti-biotics helped to clear up.
Not sure why they thought it was a bacterial URTI if your CBC was normal.
Napierwhere did you read that?
Anti-biotics can be used as immune modulators or pro-kinetic agents (i.e. laxatives) but pain killers/anti-inflammatories is a new one on me.
As an aside, this makes it harder to retrospectively diagnose Lyme arthralgia in horses after treatment trial (current blood work based diagnostics are unreliable because many if not most horses in Lyme-endemic areas have been exposed and/or infected at least once without showing any signs of disease) because even Lyme-negative horses may show improvement after treatment with doxycycline.
I have heard of macrolides having some immune-modulatory/possible anti-inflammatory in the case of lung inflammation, but never heard of it WRT musculoskeletal pain.