Myofascial Pain Syndrome Support Group

I've been re-reading all about 'perpetuating factors' as wriiten by Paul Ingraham on the www.saveyourself.ca website that I can't recommend strongly enough.

Anyway, maybe because I'm really working on 'accepting' how bad my condition is now, how 'disabled' I am at the moment, I read the section on the 'perpetuating factors' section and it really, really hit home:

-Trigger points come back because of the same reasons that they formed in the first place!

**It's so simple I forget it too often. Reading it back, I can see how I ended up in such a state as I did, but then hindsight is wonderful, isn't it?

His other comments include:
"Typical perpetuators are nutritional and hormone deficiencies, other sourcs of pain (such as a slow healing injury), muscle fatigue or stagnation or alternating between them (weekend warriorism), awkward working postures and positions, sleep deprivation, and so on."

**I was probably all of those things going into 2011 and it was a recipe for a disaster I'm still fighting against. If only....

Apparently, "Roughly 20% of people who come to see me [he's a massage therapist] with a straightforward case of trigger point pain are the “lucky ones” who get quick and lasting relief of more than 6 months. Of those, perhaps one third will never feel that pain again, or they will self-treat it so effectively that it is never much more than an annoyance. The remainder will get the pain again, probably within a year or two … because of perpetuating factors."

**I knew I was storing up 'things' to sort out, but I guess I didn't expect the damage that was done putting off sorting out the perpetuating factors.

"Perpetuating factors are numerous and often require special knowledge to recognize their importance to trigger points. They are commonly overlooked and neglected. In patients with chronic myofascial pain syndrome, attention to perpetuating factors often spells the difference between successful and failed therapy."

**So true, I didn't realise how important my working conditions were in relation to recovering from the mps. And it crept up on me over 2 years and now I can't work, am taking rediculously high numbers of medications, fighting to find my way back to some form of 'normalacy'. If only, if only...

**I really thought I could be clever about it all, and 'manage' my way through my work crisis, as it had a set end point that afterwards I thought I could then rearrange my life to support getting well again. I was so wrong, so very very wrong. And now I'm paying the price of it all.

**Out of 9 'most common' perpetuating factors I had 7 all working against me at the same time. Is it any wonder my condition deteriorated so deeply so quickly? I guess not. On this occasion a little bit of knowledge didn't go a long way...it nearly destroyed me. Because I came up with countless creative ways to manage day to day pain and stay at work and in the end I cracked and crumbled and my contribution to the work project seems to have been ignored completely.

It's a hard fight to accept what happened, how so much of it comes back to my actions, which combined with a shockingly difficult work environment to end my career as a health professional and leave me with a 'what now?' headache. But it's step 1 of Dr painclinic.org 's 12 steps to coping with pain.

It's all exhausting! Might have to give myself a little reward for getting this far without imploding and I have a gift token from someone that will do the job nicely! I might take a day off of this misery and hit the shops tomorrow (or I might spend the day in a drug-induced haze, we'll see how it turns out).
Posted on 07/16/12, 05:44 pm