What the heck is wrong with you anyway? Myofascial Pain Syndrome: An Explanation

I am the lucky participant of a strange and somewhat recently discovered pain condition. YAAAAYYY! It’s called Myofascial Pain Syndrome and it’s related to fibromyalgia. Now it’s kind of new, and doctors are really finicky about the details, but it sounds like they are discovering that a lot of chronic pain problems are myofascial.

Let’s start with definitions:

Myo means muscle. Simple.

Fascia is a bit more complicated because you probably didn’t even know you had it. Fascia is this thin membrane that covers all your muscles. Ready for the gross visual—you know that membrane thing on the outside of raw chicken, yep that’s it! Ewwww! Lucky you! You’ll get to keep that image forever! And while eating chicken. =)

 Now here is where it gets confusing. In addition to covering your muscles, Fascia also goes through your muscles, and it’s connected throughout your entire body. So the fascia in your feet is connected to fascia in your arms and stuff. There’s also other fascia besides muscles fascia; it covers everything in your body basically.

Now how does fascia get all messed up? Fascia is comparable to pantyhose, would have been a nicer visual above huh? Whoops. Anyway, when fascia is damaged from a serious muscle injury or surgery, it has to heal which leads to scar tissue. Imagine those pantyhose getting a run or trying to sew that run back together. They won’t be all nice and smooth anymore, they get bunched up.

Now that can be painful but the next important thing is those pantyhose are connected to all the pantyhose in your body (yep that’s what I’m going with) so when it bunches up it pulls on everything around it causing chronic pain. YAAAAYYYYY! That pulling affect also means that the pain is not always where the actual injury or scar tissue is located. In fact I’ve even read of pain appearing in completely different body parts. It makes it difficult to treat sometimes because you’re not sure where the problem is originating.

As this is somewhat new, getting any information about it from your doctor or online is kind of a bitch. It took me a year to figure out what was wrong with me and what my options were and that came after seeing something like eight different doctors, MRIs, X-Rays, steroid injections, and plenty of physical therapists and chiropractic physical therapists. Ultimately, I got the most answers from researching online and getting some books about it from my local library. Doctors suck! In my experience anyway.

I don’t want to get too long with this so if you want more info, please leave a comment.

I’m more informative than doctors so I’ve listed some books that helped me below.

Resources:

The Permanent Pain Cure (This book really helped me with self treatment)

http://www.amazon.com/Permanent-Pain-Cure-Breakthrough-Muscle/dp/0071627138/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1327344485&sr=1-1

Fibromyalgia and Chronic Myofascial Pain: A Survival Manual (2nd Edition) (This one helps with mental, emotional, legal, and other support.)

 http://www.amazon.com/Fibromyalgia-Chronic-Myofascial-Pain-Survival/dp/1572242388/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327344315&sr=8-1

The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook: Your Self-Treatment Guide for Pain Relief, Second Edition (This helped me pinpoint where my actual problem was which helped with self and assisted treatment)

http://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Point-Therapy-Workbook-Self-Treatment/dp/1572243759/ref=pd_sim_b_1

Clinical Mastery in the Treatment of Myofascial Pain

http://www.amazon.com/Clinical-Mastery-Treatment-Myofascial-Pain/dp/0683306200/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1327344343&sr=1-6