hi all, hope everyone is fairly well!

I visited my new physio yesterday and it was well worth the 1 hr 30 minutes journey there!

She is a very senior physio who has dealt with chronic pain and lots of neck/back/tos type problems....she feels that i have 2 problems which are playing off of each other:

1) Referred pain from C3/C4 which is causing the pain i get in my shoulder blade and the one sided headaches. She examined me thoroughly and says that all pretty much all my muscles on the right side are tight and pop up instantly with any arm movement (she had me lying down and was feeling my neck muscles with one hand and moving my arm around with the other)

2) TOS in the right arm which is possibly as a result of the above which provides me with the arm/hand pain/coldness. My shoulder is slightly pulled forward on the right probably due to tight muscles & has caused the tos... she said one problem is the chicken and the other is the hen and we may never know which is which!

Does anyone else suffer with referred pain from the neck?...its a new concept to me as i believed all my symptoms to be soley from tos!

Hi Tracy,

The only referred pain I've really read about is from trigger points causing it. But I'm sure there are other causes too.

I think often the muscle spasms can pull things out of alignment quite easily - especially if you are hypermoblie

Was she meaning the C3/C4 was a little bit "out" or "off" and causing the local area muscle issues?

the chicken /egg thing is so true about a lot of it.

This is exactly the same problem that I have. This started for auto accident over three years ago. Everyone since has said that this is refered pain, but have been unable to figure out where it is from. I have complained since the accident about it feeling like I have a golf ball pressing on my shoulder blade.

Treatments they have tried started with adhesive capsule reduction on my shoulder for the frozen shoulder. Physical therapy has been unable to help with the numbness in lower arm and hand. This led to ulnar nerve release in an attempt to help "double crush". The elbow work did not help and led me to new pain doctor. He has me on Neurontin and Baclofen for the pain after trying trigger point injections on C4. These help, but the side effects of brain fog are a real problem. I was on two Lidoderm patchs a day and fighting to keep them in place. He suggest a muscle stimulator and it seems to be controlling pain about the same. Now if we can get insurance to pay for it instead of the $14 a day for Lidoderm much happier.

i am not sure what is referred and what is not as the pain signals do not generate a report that i can study. would be neat if we could download that.

for years i was not able to roll my neck without pain. i could roll it in front from side to side as long as i went slow. it was just to painful to roll it 360 degrees.

yesterday i figured out a solution to this in yoga. during the part of a neck roll where it's easy (for me it is in the front), do an inhale. when you get to the hard part (for me it is in the back), do an exhale. i was finally able to roll my neck 360 degrees when i discovered this.

if it's ALL hard, then hold still while you are inhaling, and only move when you are exhaling.