Old Whiplash Injury, Hip Arthritis, electric jolts in the neck, could these be connected?

by Whiplash Mom

I have suffered Whiplash injury twice.

Once 10 yrs ago and another just over 2 years ago.

I started with a unrelenting headache for about 4 months, did PT and finally the PT said I needed massage and chiro.

At that point I could not turn my head to the left and tipping to both sides was stiff and painful.

The chiro adjusted both what he said was C1 and my atlas(?) and although sometimes I would get some pain relief between the two, massage seemed to make the most measurable difference.

Now 2 years later I have some stiffness in my neck at further reaches when turning that way.

Right side is OK. My neck muscles that the massage therapist is working on are what he called insertion points.

They are mucles that seem to have gone hard.

Although my neck hurts I would have to crush them to get them looser.

After I go for a while and MT also does some traction the muscles soften and then I get a LOT of muscle spasm pain all over, even the front of my neck. (the big fat muscles running down to my clavicle. Also injured in the accident was my sternum which no one would touch - everyone said just leave it alone.

Now Im getting electrical zaps at the base of my neck (no pain and this is new) and sometimes down my left arms into pointer and baby finger.

Also I woke up one night with crazy itchiness on the inside of both arms only on the inside and only from armpit to elbow... I am being investigated for a hip arthritis (I'm 36) that was found on a bone scan.

I was very fit and have lost that mobility rapidly. I'm wondering if this is all connected?

Would MS or Lupus mimic these neck issues. Most of my pain (unless a nerve zap or sting which I can identify) has to be crushed with an extreme amount of pressure and pain before the area will sink into extreme soreness and then finally relaxing. No one has even mentioned my tendons in any respect to these problems.

Do you have any advice or suspicions here? - I'm to the point where I can work M-F but have no life outside that and only leave the house if I absolutely have to (single parent:)


Thank you so much for a page where people can get help from someone who really listens.



----



Joshua Answers:


Hello. You're welcome, and thank you for the kind words. I love a good physical (injury) mystery, and at the heart of it all is a great desire to help people live better lives.

It looks like you are hurting, let's see what we can do about that.

Right off the bat it looks like you have two main things going on.

You have an old Whiplash dynamic, and it sounds like it was a significant injury.

What you have described, even up to the electric shock, but not the itchyness, is par for the course for bad/old whiplash. Nothing really surprising there.

Whiplash doesn't just heal like we would expect it to. If you don't get it taken care of the RIGHT way, it can haunt you decades later, as you are experiencing.

And it tends to get subtly worse as your body compensates.

So there's the whiplash and neck pain, and then there's the hip. Probably they're not related, certainly not directly. But you have the electric pain and itchy sensations in the arm too, which may or may not be related.

I wouldn't necessarily worry about MS or Lupus, though you definitely have some nutritional deficiency going on.

For instance, the neck spasms after massage and traction could be all or partly from Magnesium deficiency.

And/or the massage therapist isn't actually getting to the specific sites of ligament damage and helping it to heal, such that the muscles, that are tight for a reason, are forced to relax and the body then thinks it's in danger and thus spasm and pain.

Possibly you have a more significant spine injury that the body has been 'guarding' with tightness, that explains the response to relaxing muscles.

I'll say more about all that later.


Overall, I need more information. Let's investigate.


Questions:

1. Please describe both whiplash causing accidents. Just enough to give me an idea of how bad they were and what they would have looked like if I were watching a movie of them.

2. How bad is the hip. How fast did that develop? What stopped you from being active, exactly?

3. When you say you only leave the house for work, is that because of hip pain? Neck pain? Both, something else?

4. Overall health?

5. How are you energy levels?

6. How is your digestion?

7. Allergic to anything?

8. How many kids?

9. In front of a computer job? Something else?

10. History of other illness or injury?

11. Anything else I might want/need to know?



Joshua Tucker, B.A., C.M.T.
The Tendonitis Expert
www.TendonitisExpert.com