Confused newbie in pain

[Callum bosua]

Hey guys, I'm 19 years old and have suffered from Rsi for two years started from gaming and music. I pushed through symptoms for a year and sustained tennis elbow and tendonopathy in both arms as well as throbbing nerve pain and tingles in hands. It's caused me to feel hopeless many a time and worsened my already tough anxiety and ocd because I can no longer use music as an outlet. Two months ago I was swimming and felt fine but two days later my whole neck and upper back seized up and felt like I had a broken neck for weeks. Pain got slightly better after a month but hasn't gone away and upper back got worse. Caused me to cease the little sports I had left. Was seeing a very reputable and we'll trained physio for my arms when this happened who attributed neck and upper back to strain and posture (forward neck, rounded upper back and arched lower back but not aesthetically noticeable). Have been doing excersizes for posture since and noticed slight improvements but not what I or physio was expecting. She says it's not a herniated disc or spinal related but definitely muscular (even though it felt spinal related?) Read Sarno' book three days ago and have felt improvements in neck but can't shake the feeling it's not an injury. Anyway has anyone had experience with both a tms related issue (neck and upper back) and actual injury/real rsi (arms) and dealing with both/phys rehab for one and tms rehab for other.

 

[Andy Bayliss]

Dear Callum bosua,

Welcome to our Forum. I would suggest that it maybe the RSI is also a form of TMS. You can search for this in our forums to see other entries and success stories. The founder of this site, Forest suffered from RSI and recovered with Dr. Sarno's work.

We see chronic pain with no real physical cause as TMS, no matter the name or location. It is all the same. Your history of one thing after another hurting, tingling, etc is supportive of a TMS self-diagnosis. I'm not sure if there were physical diagnoses for the issues in your arms and hands before the neck, but for most there isn't anything very definitive. You have to understand that the ideas of posture causing pain is sort of the only thing those who think and are trained as physical practitioners can use to explain the pain. People who use a TMS approach dispense quickly with the whole bunch of it.

It may be confusing for me to give you this input? And it also might make the whole thing more simple, more straight forward.

You might treat the neck stuff as TMS and see what happens with the RSI in time, or add the TMS work to the RSI or arm stuff, and see the physical therapy for that part of your body as just helping you have confidence ---the touch of a caring human, the support to move, knowing none of the physio's theories about pain are actually true. But they are there for you, they care. Take that in.

The more you delve into this, the more apt you might be to drop the physio for anything, and just go pure TMS approach. Good luck feeling your way through this.

We have the free Structured Education Program at the Wiki which has helped many people.

Andy

 

[Callum bosua]

The rsi came after a long time of computer use with improper ergonomics and extensive drumming and piano. All the doctors are sure it's tendonitis. I would love for it to be tms as I feel more hope there but it does have quite a valid physical cause. As for neck and back that only started after I went for a vigorous swim. At first I thought It was because I hadn't done it in a while but now I realise it's most definitely tms (I've never injured those things from swimming). It's just so confusing not knowing how deep I should go with this because I don't want to make the wrong desicion for my arms. Has anyone had experience dealing with tms as well as a real physical condition at the same time ? Or is it always just tms to blame ?