Been lurking on these forums for a while and wanted to post a brief intro.

I'm a software engineer in the Bay Area, USA. I was diagnosed with thoracic outlet syndrome last year 3 years after the initial symptoms began. After the diagnosis, I immediately started to trawl the internet looking for more and more information. While there's some amount of 'technical' information, this forum is one of the very few places with actual experiences and real people that have gone through multi-year battles. I've benefited a lot from many posts here, thanks everyone!

Most of my story is the same as many others here. When I started to feel pain and loss of strength in my right arm, I entered this cycle of medical visits that looks like:

1/ Find an ortho surgeon / chiropractor / physical therapist
2/ Get diagnosed with tendonitis / RSI / fibromyalgia / thoracic outlet syndrome
3/ Spend a couple of months doing the non-surgical treatment
4/ Give up and try to work through the pain instead
5/ After a few months of (4), go back to (1)

Current symptoms are: pain, loss of strength in right arm, pain in right neck, shoulder blade, hip. These increase when looking down or sitting for any non-trivial amount of time.


Right now, I am working with an Egoscue clinic and seeing slow but steady progress over the last 3 months.