Scapular winging

While re-reading The Mindbody Prescription, I was surprised to see a brief mention of scapular winging by Dr Sarno. This is actually something I have and was pointed out by a physiotherapist while I was experiencing tingling in my fingers on my left arm around 5 years ago. This went on for months and took over my life for a while, as I was convinced I had MS or a heart problem. After learning about the winging and ignoring it, the tingling eventually went away (this was long before I learned about TMS).

Sarno mentions that the nerves which support the scapula muscles are frequently involved in TMS. So... is he suggesting that the winging itself is caused by TMS? I don't fully understand. Even after I stopped worrying about it, the structural change is still there 5 years later. I thought that the premise of TMS is that it doesn't cause structural damage or changes.

I'm not worrying at all about the winging, just genuinely curious and trying to further my knowledge.

 

The chicken or the egg. Sometimes the chicken, sometimes the egg. If you pull your back muscles lifting something heavy you have physically strained and hurt your back ,but our tricky TMS wired brain can in the future mimic this pain exactly and you will be convinced its from that old back injury acting up again. sometimes the brain tests out the waters to distract us with something that you never had physically but you may have once heard about, our mind paint a realistic physical manifestation that fits the description of that pain or ailment and you develop pain. fortunately in most situations it remains just a TMS pain and does not develop into something real. but as Dr Sarno believed toward the end of his life that even things like cancer can have partial TMS roots. This is why people in the TMS world always send people to check for "real" physical causes. Fortunately as I said the vast majority of cases are just our brain pulling a fast one and the fact we checked with a medical professional assuages our fears and points in the direction that its a Mind Body syndrome that we can fix ourselves. I for years had hip and knee pain, only after a visit to a honest doctor who took some x-rays and pronounce "you have nothing" did my pain go away.

 

Yeah, I agree with the poster above. Scapular winging isn't in any way painful. It just means that your scapular muscles are unbalanced or not strong enough. Which is fine as long as you're not trying to become better at handstands or olympic weight lifting (like me). Winging is in my experience not cause by TMS. Being scared of your scapular winging will however lead to pain in that area.

My advice for people with upper back pain (around the scapula) is to build up a really strong scapula. It will remove the winging and give you great posture which is nice, and looks good

 

I developed scapular winging following hip surgery in 2018. This was a particularly hard time for me and I spent 6 months really in bad shape (ripe hunting ground for TMS) both leading up to and following the surgery. When the winging manifested, I recall specifically that I was reaching up to the rear view mirror in my truck and was surprised that my hand felt like it weighed 20lbs. Later I noticed that the winging was occuring on that said, the doctors said that it happens sometimes after a surgery when the patient is being moved around while under anesthesia (or even the anesthesia can cause it) when the nerve that controls that scapula gets damaged and has to re-heal. Because nerves heal very very slowly, the length of the nerve will heal about the width of a sheet of paper per day but the nerve itself is several feet long, it would be 6 months at least before they said I would see improvement. Sure enough, it stopped winging within that timeframe.

Bringing this back to TMS though, boy did I ever freak out about the winging. It looks so deformed in the mirror and physically manifests itself in weakness (i.e. feeling like you're holding a dumbbell). I recall feeling nauseated looking at it. Regarding chicken vs egg, maybe the TMS caused the nerve damage? I don't know, but it did resolve itself without my applying TMS techniques, and within the timeframe the doctors specified, so I lean toward physical nerve damage that healed.

 

Any nerve in the body, being connected to the brain via central nervous system, may become triggered by TMS. Mainstream medicine is focused on the specific body parts, hence all the diagnoses are associated with the body part names. Everyone here goes through the step of being obsessed by the exact location of the pain. After you go through the full cycle of healing, you understand that location is irrelevant, the nature of pain is. What you are describing looks like TMS, walks like TMS, squawks like TMS. It must be TMS.

 

Hi thanks for sharing. i find this rather intriguing and relevant to part of my mindbody experience. i wanted to ask, what chapter does sarno briefly mention scapular winging? i'd like to hone in on that and see how much i can apply it to my own circumstance. hope since posting this your circumstance has improved and fully recovered.

 

Every Sarno book I have contains an index in the back, and I was suprised when I check just now not to see "winged scapula" or "scapular winging" listed as the indexes (indices?) are usually pretty comprehensive. Maybe the mention was so small it didn't warrant an index entry.

Regardless though, because of the modality this seems to be a pretty obvious territory for TMS. My own experience aligns for example. Looking back at my 3+ year old post above, I failed to notice/recognize that it was probably a bit too much of a coincidence that my particular winging resolved itself in almost exactly the timeline the Dr suggested?

 

After dealing with a myriad of physical changes of all kinds, I believe many postural changes are due to anxiety. In another post you mention that you have anxiety oriented breathing habits that you also are hyper aware of. This is all simply a cycle you can correct by doing the TMS work and letting your nervous system respond with safety and eventually unwind itself from these old anxious patterns.
@JanAtheCPA is right, you need to get insight into your personality traits, thought habits, and do the emotional work Dr. Sarno sets out for us to do which includes examining our belief systems.