Chronic Elbow/arm pain "From guitar, workout". TMS?

Hello dear TMS-brothers-sisters!

This is Mikael from Finland up north (Yes i also believe that this TMS-thing is acutally 100% world wide). I just had to join this site to bring all possible support for myself to really start believing that i have TMS. This is the fourth day after I discovered Dr. Sarno luckily just by looking for information about RSI on the web IN ENGLISH (why didn't i earlier look for info and help worlwide! We have six million people in Finland, haven't found many words about TMS/Dr. Sarno in finnish. I have orderd Dr. Sarnos books already from Amazon and I'm waiting for them to arrive. I also have studied a lot about TMS during these days)

This first part is from my past five years ago when i felt the same sympoms as today. I recovered from it 100% for a long time. Do skip if you feel like it. The most importat thing to mention here is that after i got the pain in my right elbow/arm, few weeks later my pain showed up suddenly also in my left elbow/arm totally out of the blue. I'm also gonna tell a lot of deatails about my personality so that readers would understand/ be able to help me/relate to me better.

FIVE YEARS AGO (february 2009)

So, Im 1992 born guy who got his first symptomes five years ago in my right elbow. It pretty much started slowly from playing the guitar( 3-7hours per day usually, sometimes even up to ten). i also had starded working out at the gym few times a week and did courses in high school at the time ( ->some level of writing and typing). The stress on my arms were pretty much as you can imagine. It took me a while to start taking the pain seriously and i didn't before it was pretty bad. I deciced to have a pause from everything with my right hand.

As few weeks went by i had started to use my left arm to do most of all the work. This is when the Strange thing happened. I sat in my school's cafeteria when i turned myself to look left for a second. BAM! A thunderstruck from sky hit my left elbow harder than anyting ever in the right one! In a split second, it was there all there. After this every symptom that occured in the right elbow/arm also took life in the left one( always just a bit less/more seldom in the left than in the right)

At the time i didn't visit many doctors and i simply wasn't doing much at all for four months. I simply rested, stayed out form the guitar and typing and just wrote few exams the best i could, no more than that. I had decent ache in my arms about once per hour for about 10 min.

After four months of resting i noticed that i was able to do more and more daily needs/tasks without pain. I decided to take the guitar back and play till any symptome appeared. first day one minute, next day two, then five etc. Gradually I got up to 2 hours in few weeks and could even start working out again! I was rapidly cured. Some symptomes came now and then back after too much stress on arms, but i managed very well. Back then it was somehow so...easy.

LAST YEAR (march-april 2014)


As the years passed I had evolved to a more and more ambitious person. I've also always been concerned pretty much about how other people think about me. I can't remember myself fighting really ever with anyone, I always want to be able to avoid uncenecessary negative feelings between peolple and get things fixed with reason and optimistic thinking. One factor due to TMS is to mention that I have suffered from mild stuttering (many of my relatives also stutter) from the age of five approximitely. Situational stuttering (Depends totally on the situation or to who I'm talking to) is a thing that has always made me fear certain kind of moments or upcoming events. Anyway, nowadays i stutter quite a little, but i still have fears about it.

It was march 2014 when I had praticing pretty hard on new techniques on my guitar and played still many hours a day usually. I also worked out 5-6 times a week at the gym and had to type a lot of reports on PC. I had also started a strict diet for few months because of working out etc. I had a lot of serious projects going and that's how I often am, even thouhg i consider myself a relaxed guy who doesn't really live to scheduels. I Always wanna become very good in things i care about and create own versions/ideas.

I started get the old elbow symptoms suddenly in my right arm again when playing the guitar. I backed off a litte, but somehow the pain just didn't. I started again using my lefty for a while more, and one day on the PC, the ache started a litte in my left. I could't work out either after a while. After a while i started to try the good old little by little recovery strategy with the guitar as I did five years ago. I could play even 10min the first day but the symptoms always hit me harder the next day. I tried this many many times with failure.

I soon went to see a physiotherapist and se talked to me about somekind of a nerve RSI. I seemed logical and he gave me few moves to help. Didn't really work, pain grew by time a litte. I had to back of from school and computer etc. This is why arm pain sucks so deeply, i could't do much anything that gives my joy to live.

I saw an arm-surgeon after few months. At the time i didn't have that much ache and after a moment of scanning my body he just claimed: "You're totally healthy". I didn't concur and we talked a bit more. At last he gave me a diagnose of some kind of a muscle-membrane RSI wich you usually just get in your legs from running. After this i saw another physiotherapist and few doctors. Didn't get any big results. Pains decreased a litte by time, when i started jogging gradually (couln't really run in the beginning)
January 2015

No big changes till now. I saw another arm-surgeon who was wondering about my dicease. He could't concure to the last arm-surgeons diagnose and told me just continue with physioterapy moves. I was pretty puzzled now and didn't now what to do. I have this strange symptome which gave me a pinch in the left side of my neck always when shower water hits it. Then the pain/pich kind of radiates to my left elbow as a normal elbow symptom. One morning i went to goolgle information about this specific symptome when instead i came across other peoples succes storys on RSI and Dr. John Sarno.


Hope you had the energy to read this and if you can give anykind of support/knowledge, please do !

 

funny that my back pain seemed to start around time I began playing guitar...I assumed this was a postural thing. now I think my intense focus on playing music was a distraction from what I was feeling.
you are in the right place. I would recommend listening to Healing Back Pain audiobook on repeat, its excellent.

 

Good point with " now I think my intense focus on playing music was a distraction from what I was feeling". Well at least i'm getting them books very soon! At one point two years ago I started getting some degree of symptoms from piano and violin on my right shoulder, had to back off a bit, but i guess it went by.

 

Hey Miik!

Welcome! I suffered from what they call Tennis-Elbow. My story sounds very similar to yours. It was mostly brought on by keying on my PC at work. I started using voice recognition software on my PC so I wouldn't have to type so much. I also play guitar a lot and that aggravated it, as well. It was in both my elbows and I eventually had surgery to repair it in my right elbow. The surgery did not help at all!

Finally, after suffering for nearly two years, I made up my mind that it was TMS and it has gone away completely. Completely! It hasn't returned in over 5 yearss

 

Hi, Miik and Captain Spanky. A terrific exchange of posts from you guys.
I healed from severe back pain after learning about TMS and reading Dr. Sarno's book
Healing Back Pain. I journaled to discover I had repressed anger going back to my parents' divorce
when I was seven years old. It left me feeling abandoned and insecure. I was able to understand
my parents better and figured they had their own TMS repressed emotions. That led to me
forgiving them, and then my back pain went away.

A very good friend is divorcing after 25 years, and said he should have done it years ago.
They have a teenage son and I hope he doesn't live with the emotions I felt from my parents' divorce.

I recently read how widespread divorce has become, and that children of divorced parents are
much more likely to drop out of school and take to drinking and drugs. I didn't do any of that,
but I think it was because I had a lot of ambition to become a writer, so I could write books
that could help children and teenagers. I've had about 50 books published now, a list is at
www.walteroleksybooks.com. One of the newest ones, for adults, is on TMS healing, called
GOES NOT WANT YOU TO BE IN PAIN, adding faith to TMS healing techniques.
It's in paperback and a Kindle edition at amazon.com books.

 

Hi Miik,
Thanks for sharing your story. My foot pain got worse and worse, and even though most doctors said they could find nothing structurally wrong with the feet, many were quite ready to operate. Luckily I found Dr. Sarno's work, and did not get surgery. After journalling, and increasing activity a little each day (like you did), I was able to hike and ski in the mountains again, after being disabled for about 3 years.

Each of us figures out how to apply Dr. Sarno's teachings to our particular situation. If you read Sarno, and you begin to contemplate and think that the pain you experience is caused by your tension, and pressure and rage and frustration from being a "peaceful" person (like me), these are all good techniques.

At the Wiki part here, we have the SEP which you can use to guide you through a proven set of Dr. Sarno type practices.
http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/Structured_Educational_Program
Many have eliminated their symptoms by following this program.

The main challenge in my view is to eliminate your doubts about the diagnosis being TMS. Then you learn to think psychological more and more, and this is the heart of the cure. You turn your mind to the psychological (even if you don't have a perfect answer), instead of the physical, and pain loses its distraction purpose.

Good Luck!

Andy B

 

Thanks for all of you guys, didn't think of gettin even this much readers/support! This is my seventh day now in the battle. I constantly tell my selft that the pain in caused byt TMS and that i CAN do normal activities. I have everyday spent hours exploring my emotions in the present and past, and been looking for reasons for this. I've realized that I have more than enough things in the back of my head to cause this. I have increased the amount of wrtiting/playing each day a bit. I've still had quite a lot of symptoms when I bring back playing/writing increasingly. But I have to say that the symptoms which I used to get afterwards(for ex. in the night when sleeping or the next day) have started to vanish! I'm really starting to believe in this, there's just so much evidence!

I'll be BACK sharing my progress later on!

 

I found through journaling that there were many complex emotions around playing music. Not the least of which was perfectionism. Perfectionism... where the Child and Super-ego collide in a fit of rage.

 

Spanky, Ellen, everyone.

Becca sent me this google link about meditation and I think we could all benefit from reading the articles.

if you want to see something very cool, just google "mindfulness meditation chronic pain" .
A ton of great articles come up: https://www.google.com/search?...ic+pain

 

I Can' believe it. I just played 50min steel guitar!! A little symptoms in the beginning 10-25min, rest was pretty much painfree!! Except My Right knee/leg got a some "new mysterious pains" offcourse !! I guess my brains masterplan is starting to lose it's grip!

 

Dear Miik,
This is wonderful!! I hope you really contemplate this breakthrough. This kind of change, and letting the reality of this good experience go deep into you is a huge part of making progress. It is evidence that you have TMS, and that you are taking the right action to cure it.

For me it only took a few exceptions to the old pain pattern, and the symptoms became less and less.

Andy B.