Back/neck pain

Dr. Morbs, possibly sacroiliac joint inflammation? I've had this since mid-December, worse in the morning, getting better as the day goes on.
Finally went to urgent card Dec 26, where I got prescription ibuprofen and a muscle relaxant. My problem was that I was using a heating pad, which was not good for an inflammation (duh), should have used cold first. Over the counter ibuprofen was 200mg, the prescription is 600. It's been helping. I have to start doing exercises and follow up with my regular doctor soon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacroiliac_joint

Heating pad substitute: Pour dry rice or beans into a sock (or the cut off sleeve of a discarded cotton shirt/wool sweater) and tie off the open end. Heat in the oven on the lowest heat setting for 15 minutes or try microwaving for a few minutes.

Pain deteriorated some today w/ no treatment other than a post-holiday party w/ lots white wine last night.

Ibuprofen is great because it reduces inflammation, which is nearly always a factor in back/neck/joint pain and this fact alone means it aids healing. It also reduces pain, so that's peachy, too. Icing (cold packs) are also very helpful with inflammation, but icing an area isn't always very convenient.

The OTC bottles of ibuprofen will tell you to limit the doseage to 400 mg, but for max effectiveness for inflammation, 600 mg is better. BUT... ibuprofen is HARSH on your liver and kidneys, so drink PLENTY of water when you take it, and if you are taking megadoses, limit yourself to 2 or maybe 3 days of that, and stop if you're experiencing any weird effects.

The weakness of ibuprofen is that it will not remove the root cause of the pain, if the cause is ongoing, like a pinched nerve. It's an aid, but not a cure.

ime, M.D.s are not well versed in or even very interested in minor musculo-skeletal problems, so they aren't very adept at solving them. I've had good success with a local chiropractor who specializes in sports injuries. She doesn't really tout any of the theory that chiropractic was founded on (which theory is quackery, imo), but she is excellent at diagnosing musculo-skeletal interactions and seeing where the problem is. For the small, but painful, stuff she is my go-to doctor and she hasn't steered me wrong, yet.

oh yeah, i took ibuprofen.

oh shit. Something has happened just above my lower back on the right hand side. I've had twinges from my shitty chair before but this one won't go away. Stabbing pain at really odd moments, like when I'm not even using (I guess) anything there. It's also making me feel quite sick. Do I lie on a flat surface or whatever? Do I stretch? Desperate to not do any more damage as I've got a long day of travelling on trains and buses tomorrow. I did just order a better chair though. Dear lord why didn't I before.

Anti-inflammatories, ice pack, and lie on your back on the floor with knees bent. If it doesn't feel better in a couple of days, doctor.

Are you sure it's your back and not your kidneys?

I've had kidney trouble before so I'm pretty sure it's not that. I did what you said and also slept minus pillows. Pains are slightly less bad this morning but as frequent as yesterday. Think I might hit the doctors on monday if tomorrow isn't any better. This couldn't have come at a worse time. Thanks for the advice quincie.

not very exciting advice, and IANAD, but I do feel your pain. lying on the floor right now myself.

my boyfriend has been suffering chronic neck pain & muscle tension for years. the past week has been really bad and has been affecting his sleep and mood. i don't know what to do, but i feel like i need to try to help him because it's really difficult to see him in so much pain.

it's not like he's passivey suffering, either: he sees a clinical massage therapist pretty regularly, has been taking a stretch class, even sleeps with a dental guard to stop grinding his teeth at night. i've been massaging his back daily and applying liberal doses of tiger balm. all these things help a little, but the pain never really goes away completely and i just want him to get a good night's sleep. i don't know.

i have heard about exactly one good reference to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_technique

sounds like it might be quackery but then again i don't mind acupuncture or cupping and hey if it works it works.

you know, i've heard of that before, actually. but oddly enough, only as a form of training among my friends who were theatre majors in college, not as therapy. i'll look into it!

oh and he has been to the a osteopath too.

Alexanders is very good. I've only read about it really and never been to a session (more because of money). I heard pilates is good too. Otherwise I recommend a good osteopath, not a chiropractor.

but no, Alexanders was invented by an actor but can be excellent for long term posture correction and pain. It's largely based on retraining the brain to recognise situations where one might be moving in ways that do damage to your body. It's a very long-term thing though, not an instant cure. The idea is that when we try to correct our postures by making a conscious effort to sit or stand up straight, it throws other parts of the body into equally unnatural positions. By training the brain to recognise when we are (for example) slouching or slumping into a chair or squeezing into a car seat or flopping into bed, you're asked to take a few moments to make yourself aware of your surroundings and how your body is placed in it. Eventually you get used to moving in a more careful way, thus minimising tension and stress in the back and shoulders etc.

have been a long term neck pain sufferer, which has also given me quite bad pain in my right shoulder and arm. recently had a new course of physio for it, and was introduced to retraction exercises (google 'retraction exercises for neck pain' and you'll find lots of youtubes etc for examples.) anyway, a month or so of doing the exercise seems to have really worked for me, fwiw (only side effect - you look like a total gurning loon while doing it, so it's not something you can really do while sat at your desk etc.)

My solution to years of neck/back pain was by dealing with that 1/3 of my life I spend in bed: a thicker pillow (actually a thin 2nd pillow) to straighten my neck and a pillow between my legs to straighten my spine.

it looks like there are a few alexander teachers locally, so i'll recommend that to him

honestly he does have some bad sleeping habits -- he moves around a lot during the night and ends up in positions that exacerbate the pain -- but those aren't things he can easily control.

pillow between legs is excellent. get one of those long tubular pillows that he can put between his legs and kind of hug and lie on at the time - it totally supports your back in each position and hopefully stop him moving about.

i started lifting heavy weights about a year ago. deadlifts, squats, bench presses. i have not had any back pain whatsoever since then. fwiw.

i mean, it could be a coincidence but my poor pathetic back is now way stronger which must be helping.

that's another good idea. he tends to avoid strength training at the gym, which probably doesn't help matters

Heavy weights (as Tracer described) were fantastic for alleviating my lower back pain. Quitting desk job, moving to the beach, and daily swimming/paddleboarding also did the trick. Snorkeling bothers my neck, sadly.

And yoga can be either great or terrible for necl/back, ime.

ugh. sitting in a fixed (bad posture) position for an hour or so at a shitty Amway meeting (see other thread, ugh) gave me what I think is a pinched nerve in my upper back/neck. been over a week and a half. finally seems to be starting to heal, but sends flares down my left side including my hip and arms.

didn't help that I stupidly did high intensity weight exercises that aggravated it before it had a chance to heal, but now that I've avoided those seem to be getting closer. how long does it take to go away generally? puttin gIcy Hot on it and staying active.

Where is your Amway meeting story? I love a good Amway meeting story.

Amway and other multi-level marketing cults

It was kind of boring (Spottie's is way better). My bestie isn't one of those crazed Amway cult guys who wears the spinny-glasses and says "you willlll selll Amwayyyy", he's kind of skeptical and understood my reasons.

Everybody around me had much fancier suits/clothing than I did, like they had bought them specifically for this meeting. They even try to sell you on the exclusivity of the whole thing as if it's a virtue, by making you sign in and giving you a special card to gain access (you have to be a friend of a member, wow, the power!).

It was in some 3-star hotel, the conference room. the speaker was literally 4 feet tall with a lazy eye, probably my age. He lives in Maitland, FL, meaning he clearly doesn't have much baller status cos it's a nothing city. He had two Mr Bigg gold rings on that he purposefully kept positioning his hands to show off to the crowd like "ALL THIS CAN BE YOUUUURS". despite being a guy that supposedly does this speaking for a living, he said "uh" every 5 seconds, and kept losing focus and going off on tangents, telling really shitty jokes ("some people out there say they're happy, I reply 'have you notified your face?'. *explosive herd laughter*), then saying "we have fun here!" after every one of them as if to illustrate that, yes, he just told a joke, and people liked it.

you'd also think a guy that does public speaking frequently would have been prepared and had a clicker handy to advance slides rather than sashaying over to the touchscreen to manualy advance it each time. or a presentation not written entirely in Comic Sans and containing graphics that seemed straight out of Microsoft clipart circa 1997. Why would you have a pic of a hamburger on a slide about the different types of cash flow (with no metaphor to connect the two)?

He also started describing the third-tier knockoff apps they had (their ITunes ripoff had something LOL-worthy generic like "IListen" or something), and peddling the Nutrilite stuff, telling us how we could peddle these to our loved ones ("you all take vitamins and stuff right? Here let me give you some samples, I can get ya a good rate!").

At the end they offer us the exclusive opportunity to meet this *amazing* man as if we will be honored to bask in the glow of his aura. I shook his hand, and after talking to him part of me had to ask myself "is this a dude that they propped up to pretend to be worth 250k, cos he looks like the guy you see in a cubicle complaining that the supply closet is out of staples". On the way out, they immediately hand me a gift basket of Nutrilite shit and try to schedule a follow-up w/ me and I made some excuse like "well I'm uhh kinda busy let me check my 'schedule'", ate all the Nutrilite crap by the next afternoon, and then told my friend "yeah fuck this".

I've had some left shoulder/neck/upper back pain that has coalesced over the last week into the world's worst crick. The way it's going, I think it'll work itself out in the next 3-4 days, but this is really miserable right now. Can't find a comfortable position for my left arm.

I've been on trains these last three days and my tailbone is super fucking sore. Aggravating it is the fact that I lost a bunch of weight in my butt and the extra padding's gone.

argh woken up with neck pain is the worst

I've got it like between my shoulder blades, it really hurts when I look upwards.

bulging disc at c5, was just given a course of steroids, oxycodone/acetaminophen and muscle relaxers
feeling a little loopy right now tbh

huh well i appear to be dying right now

dying of pain or dying of muscle relaxation bodymeld to furniture?

if you're on the couch, be on the couch
if you're in the couch, be in the couch

I herniated 2 discs in my neck like 10 years ago. Excruciating. There are great exercises you can do to relieve the pain your neck, like pushing your chin with your pointer finger to your chest, holding it there

been doing that. the medication is not agreeing with me and the bulging disc is impinging my shoulder. shoulder and neck pain are keeping me from sleeping, medication is roiling my stomach and the migraine from lack of sleep is making me light/sound sensitive and in pain from crown to hip. oxycodone is not impacting the pain and the steroids aren't hitting the neck yet. spent three hours balled up and moaning. it's a bad time.

Forks that's horrible. Herniated discs are incredibly painful and I'm sorry you're not getting relief from the meds.

thx. i'm having a bit of a rough time insofar as my gf just went home to her mother for a week right as this is hitting an apex and i'm pretty frustrated. gotta get some sleep here.

ouch! no idea why but the last few days I've had increasing pain right at the base of my spine. it started off as what I thought was a bit of healthy muscle tenderness from going to the gym, but each morning i've woken up and it's felt worse to the point where I'm having trouble walking or sitting properly.

man, pain fucking sucks.

I was having a rough time of it until I reassessed my pillow situation and added more support there. Now if I could just get the dog to shut the fuck up at 5 a.m. I could get some sleep.

But that's nothing compared to a bulging disc. GL forks

Had a backache for a couple days, took a hot bath last night hoping to ease it. Within a half hour of getting out my back seized up so bad I could barely move without groaning or cussing.

Never had back pain that bad. I was like pale from the pain. I felt like I needed a leather strap to bite down on while trying to go to bed. Even considered going to the hospital (as if this were a back-pain version of appendicitis and my spin was about to explode or something) but I didn't even know how I'd get there.

Better but still delicate this morning. But holy shit.

sounds to me like muscle spasms in your back. when that happened to me it was some of the worst pain I've yet experienced. a doctor would probably prescribe muscle relaxants and rest. too bad you can't get muscle relaxant meds over the counter. even getting yourself to a doctor's office when your back is spasming becomes a problem in itself, bcz of the intense pain.

Never got the appeal of relaxing in a tub. If bathtubs were actually comfortable there'd be an epidemic of accidental drownings.

I like the heat from a hot bath and I feel like it's good for the circulation and maybe even the immune system, but I'll think twice about taking a bath specifically for back pain ever again.

Crazy how much better I'm doing this afternoon. Went from crippling pain to just a modest ache in 12 hours. Very odd.

btw if back pain persists, see a damn doctor. mine noted above in 2012 turned out to be myeloma.

Yikes! Are you OK? How did that play out?

I considered it could be something else, but for now I'm gonna trust Occam's Razor on this one. I slept on my back weird and probably exacerbated it through some strenuous exercise and yard work