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Permalink Reply by acidrock23 on May 5, 2012 at 6:46am

Thanks for the interesting report and I'm glad to hear that they are getting it fixed up for you!

That's an interesting observation about the younger ortho. My GP seems pretty young too and seems to range a bit farther afield, talking about food and stuff, than a lot of docs I've run into?

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Permalink Reply by teld on May 5, 2012 at 9:47am

Hi Tim,

For the remaining 25%...have you tried releasing your subscapularis trigger points? I think it was this set of trigger points that helped his frozen shoulder the most and that became the primary reason Clair Davies got into trigger point therapy in the first place.

If I haven't said so already, I'm prediabetic and have had tendon problems for several years now, increasing in the last few years as my blood sugar issues apparently worsened. Trigger point therapy has helped me a lot - both what I learned years ago and what I've learned more recently. If I recall correctly, Dr. Bernstein believes that reducing blood sugars will lessen chances of acquiring such conditions (frozen shoulder, plantar fasciitis, iliotibial band syndrome, etc.), but that once they happen, they need therapy to heal.

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Permalink Reply by Melitta on May 5, 2012 at 1:46pm

Hi Teld: I am a total fan of trigger point therapy! I had a problem shoulder due to computer mousing. I got a new ergo mouse and went to a trigger point therapist who studied with Clair Davies, and that fixed me up. It was a miracle.

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Permalink Reply by teld on May 5, 2012 at 2:15pm

I know! And you were lucky!

It amazes me that the solution to so much pain lies outside conventional medicine. As I understand it, he was a piano repair man with a good sense of how things work (I guess muscles are not much different from harmonic chords...!) who fixed his own frozen shoulder using trigger point therapy, and now he's a massage therapist specializing in it. I refer to his book (the general one, though I think he also wrote a frozen shoulder one) every day. I'd just started to read it when I was walking outside and my knee started bothering me. I went in, looked up the location of the pain, did a quick massage, got up...and was able to walk around again without pain for several minutes...then it came back just a fraction as strongly, but I stopped, figuring it was best not to push it. I continued working those points for a couple of days and the pain didn't return.

Now when I start to get a headache, or my piriformis or psoas or knees or whatever act up, it takes maybe fifteen minutes to deal with it. Sometimes it gets rid of all the pain with a few sessions, other times it eases it somewhat, and on some occasions (usually headaches) it has no effect - but that's rare. Which means it's at least as good as a painkiller for me.

I'd been to multiple physical therapists, an orthopedist, a chiropractor, many massage therapists...nobody helped for my various complaints remotely as much as trigger point. I'd also read Pain Erasure many years ago and had used that for reference, but it wasn't nearly as helpful as Davie's book, which I put off getting for a couple of years before I finally broke down.

Now I'm a terrible evangelist. When someone I know gets an ache or pain, I positively light up - they must think I'm a sadist - and then attack them with fingers and thumbs.

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Permalink Reply by Brian Wittman on May 5, 2012 at 10:05am

Both of my shoulders have been frozen for years. It took about two years for the pain to subside, and hence forth, they have limited motion. My PT and Orthopedist both say they are probably about as good as they will ever be. What bothers me most is having to stretch in choir rehearsal, reaching for the top shelf and trying to pull wrenches. I guess I have become accustomed to the outcome and have learned to live with it.

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