What causes severe muscle spasms and knots... - Pain Management Message Board

cya · 06-14-2004, 09:15 PM

What causes these to continue on long after an injury? I have spasms so strong that they cause jerking in my arms legs and neck with certain movements and positions. These jerks are very painful and uncontrolable. During my MRI they said to hold stil but I these movements were involentary. Are knots in the muscle called trigger points?

feelbad · 06-15-2004, 06:17 AM

Have you had your magnesium level checked lately?some muscle twitches and spasms are somewhat normal in your situation but these sound much more violent than the norm.My son had an extremely low magnesium level once and the contortions and contractions of the muscles in his arms were really horrific.He was just lying on the couch one night and all of the sudden his arms and hands became like almost violently spastic and started these horrible contractions that were extremely sharp.it was really hard to watch that.We had no clue as to what caused these to occur at the time.my son was in liver failure and had all kinds of bizarre things going on in his body at the time.I ended up taking him into the ER as they just kept getting worse and we were both scared to death about just what could cause all this to happen.and when they ran his labs, we discovered that his magnesium level had completely bottomed out.

It wouldn't hurt to go to your doc and just have some simple labs run.He would need to check your potassium as well as the magnesium.Low potassium levels can also cause muscle spasms.These spasms could be totally unrelated to your injury.just a thought.Hope these go away soon. marcia

Shoreline · 06-16-2004, 10:00 AM

Hi CYA, Marcia made some great points. Magnesium was one of the meds they tried on me for restless leg, jerking from metabolites from opiates. But often we can be to quick to self DX and write them off as part of our injury.

Excluding other causes, when an injury occurs to part of the body, particluraly the spine, the brain sends signals to the surouding muscles to tighten up and brace the area ffrom further injury, blood flow icreases to the area causing more swelling, knots and spasm. Trigger point injections or trigger point pressure therapy may help, or you may need medication for spasms or spacticity.

Trigger point pressure is just presure applied to the knot "trigger point" to drive the extra blood from the area and carry away waste products like lactic acid that forms from the contractions. It's actually something you can learn to work on yourself as we can't go to the doc for TP injectons every day.

There is a device called a Theracane available to apply your own pressure, there are techniques your SI can learn to apply pressure to break up a trigger point and little tricks like laying on a tennis ball to drive the blood out of the trigger point. The tennis ball works great on the Glutes and periformis although people wonder when it's going to hatch.LOL But if the problem is related to a vitamin deficiancy as Marcia described these methods will only give you very temp relief and the root cause needs to be found.

You do have to be careful trying to self DX a problem. I self DX GERDS and reflux right up untill I called the ambulance during a heart attack at the age of 36. Both problems cause pain and the Vega nerve carries the signal of both stomach and heart pain making it hard to destiguish the two without real medical testing, so without the blood work to verify a MI or diagnostics to suggest that it is a stomach problem I was really just guessing based on minimal information other than the feeling of pain.

Some PM's don't want to get involved in other aspects of your health so your GP would likely be the first person to talk to, if they rule out other conditions and it is solely due to the injury your PM is treating , at that point the PM doc can prescribe the proper meds to relieve spasm or spasticity.
Take care and CYA later, Dave