Neck and Upper back pain

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timkav

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Hello, I have had chronic pain in various parts of my body for close to two years now. Started out with left sided arm/hip/leg pain. And then I had bilateral rib pain. For the last several months, I’ve had mid/upper back pain. I had a thoracic MRI and it showed two herniated discs. Now I’m experiencing horrible back of neck pain that is causing headaches. I haven’t Been given an official fibromyalgia diagnosis but two doctors said this is most likely some sort of myalgia or fibromyalgia. Could fibromyalgia be the cause of my neck pain? Every few months the pain moves to a new area, it’s exhausting. Thanks for any insight you can share.
 
Hi timkav,

To answer y our question - yes, this could be fibromyalgia. It also, however, could be a whole lot of other things and it is important to get tested thoroughly for all of the things that could be causing it. You don't want your doctor to jump to the fibromyalgia diagnosis without checking for markers of everything else that causes similar symptoms. Just the herniated discs could be causing a great deal of that pain in your neck, hips, legs etc.
I suggest you seek out a really skilled chiropractor because it may be that your spine is misaligned from having to deal with the neck pain from the discs, and that can actually travel down your body to hips and legs. Getting an X-ray of your whole spine might be a part of your investigation of what is going on.

Best of luck to you!
 
completely agree with the potential of the known disc problem being a factor in the other pain.. but yes, you DO need to make sure other issues are ruled out before landing on fibromyalgia.. there are just so many other things that have similar symptoms, and are far more detrimental to your physical health
Being as you already have known disc problems in your back, it is advisable to make sure there are no problems in the neck (cervical) region as well..
i have neck issues myself - a mild subluxation of C4 over C5, collapse of C6/C7 inter-space and arthritis throughout, and I do get headaches from it, so yeah.. a good idea to investigate the whole spine - rule out any other issues.
 
Hi there! -
Moving pain to me means local pains that can very often be tackled individually, in my case all of them could and can.
I'm pretty sure they "move" or "alternate" because when we adjust our posture to one that may be easier on that, but cause problems elsewhere because the "root" in the muscles, tendons, fasciae etc. hasn't been ironed out.
Either by good gentle listening physiotherapists who can do things like acupressure, osteopathy, myofascial, Scar- and Bonework, trigger pointing and all the other techniques
Or by trying out all the many exercises, stretches and acupressure videos for each single pain as soon as it twinges.
Or both.
Just had it this week again, suddenly 3 old pain areas cropped up due to the cold & damp, maybe even due to trying whole body cryotherapy again: My neck tightened, my clavicle and shoulder and my right knee. Because I tackled them all immediately and also now know several tricks that got them down the last times, I got them down inside of a few hours. For my clavicle various stretches every hour and for my knee my massage 'gun', for my neck a combination of both.

Of course all of these have to be compatible with the herniated discs. If you look exercises & stretches for those you will find for instance DoctorJo, Bob & Brad which are both often fairly good, and Back Intelligence tells you what exercises to do and in another video what not to do....
Once you've carefully got that under control more, you can tackle the back & neck pain. And as soon as those are better check if any of the older pains need a bit of preventative stretching. Often we can feel that those muscles & tendons aren't as flexible as they should be even before the pains start.
 
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