Hello!
I’ve got excruciating muscle spasms in my head, neck, shoulders and back. I couldn’t sleep and was in tears with it. I’m going to the GP next week to see if there’s anything they can prescribe and I’m using Epsom salt baths, plus I have some tiger balm cream coming today… just wondering if anyone has any other suggestions?
💙
Hi there, I get that kind of pain and in my opion it tends to be more stress related than fibro. My only suggestion im afraid is to try and relax the tension. Over thinking everything can sometimes be the cause of a lot of body pain. I hope it eases up soon.
Momo
Thank you - I’ll do my best! 😁💙
My lady Doctor gives me quinine sulphate. I don't use it all the time but it is great when I get the first scary sensations of a muscle spasm wanting to make my life unbearable for a while - mine is usually inner thighs though. Have had one spinal mishap between my shoulders and upper back after seeing a stand-in chiropractor. It was the middle of the night and I was just straightening up after getting out of bed. All I could do is howl!- Something that may help is remedial massage if you can find someone to do it. Ice? Acupuncture? Dry needling possibly but not tried that. .. yet! How are your potassium levels? Are you doing too many stretches? Changes in temperature really seem to mess about with metabolism for things like that. - You can get small doses of quinine in fevertree tonic but don't go for anything with synthetic sweetener. My neck one goes if I yawn so I run my fingers down it quite harshly. Try vagus nerve stimulation too.
Muscle spasms can be caused by a deficiency of copper, which is common in fibromyalgia, and magnesium and calcium, both of which are also common with fibromyalgia. The problem is that if either magnesium or calcium is lower, the lab tests are liable to only show the lowest one and not the other, and if you start increasing one without the other, and they are both low, you're putting yourself at risk of cardiac issues.
The bigger problem with copper is if you don't have enough ceruloplasmin, and other copper transporters and chaperones like SOD3 and ATP7A, then the copper can become free radical, which turns out by some research to be part of what's going on with diabetes as well.
Even when inhaled in silicosis, silica can increase ceruloplasmin, but so can gabapentin, and for me I find much better, horizant - and if you take it with meals it lasts 12 hours as well as being consistently absorbed so you can take magnesium at any time whereas gabapentin suggests that you take it 2 to 4 hours after one dose and 2 hours before the next which gives you one gold an hour when you can take magnesium.
On the other hand, since I have thyroid problems and can't eat food for a 6 1/2 hour period every time I take thyroid, half hour after, and I have diabetes so I can't just eat whenever, I have to take it every 10 hours or usually it lasts about 9 and 1/2. that means I need three pills a day and it's $4,000 for 3 months, I guess it's 100 days, supply.
It also prioritizes magnesium to the brain, which means that you cannot just go off of it. To taper off, I am going to have to go back to gabapentin. I'm looking at the end of the cause of my fibromyalgia, but the treatment is dangerous and so I won't discuss it in detail. Just know that the bond between copper and omeprazole is irreversible according to Dale and Rang's Pharmacology, and some research shows that it also can cause cognitive decline in all seven areas that were tested and esomeprazole only in four.
So increasing your ceruloplasmin may, and I only say may because that may not apply to you, but it may be necessary to use the copper that you take. And my research shows that it is possible that too much copper can cause fibromyalgia as well, but I know too little can cause spasming.
I don't know enough about calcium causing spasming, only a research article that showed that a woman had psychogenic non epileptic seizures that stopped when she started getting an infusion, meaning probably like a transfusion, of calcium, even though she'd been taking calcium carbonate and Tums which is also calcium carbonate. In other words, the form matters, and calcium carbonate was not the right form.
I personally use calcium citrate and try to get it from food where I can. I cannot use milk products because of the lactium in them, it relaxes and reduces stress and runs out of the body in less than 8 hours, so I go through withdrawal symptoms when I sleep. And I wake up in hell which I don't when I wear the copper bracelets.
So I don't know enough about the mechanism but calcium is one possibility. And remember you have to do magnesium more or less at the same time, but also . . .
calcium can block magnesium absorption just as magnesium can push calcium in better. Don't know the mechanism. Saw the research and tested on myself and found it valid. Your mileage may vary. But I suggest skin absorption magnesium anyway. You don't get diarrhea that way, unless maybe you bathed in it. Epsom salts are magnesium sulfate, and if you're using them already, here's a trick.
If Epsom salts don't make it better but maybe even make it worse, you're probably low on calcium. If they make it better, then you're low on magnesium.
if you didn't take Prilosec ever, that's Omeprazole or proton pump inhibitor or ppi, then magnesium malate which is supposed to go more directly to the enzymes, as I see it it is the form that is used by the enzymes and therefore the puzzle piece fits directly in whereas if it has to go to the brain it has to be changed into something that will cross the blood-brain barrier like magnesium threonate, which I have tested and found indeed to be beneficial that way and which I will be using when I come off of gabapentin, and which is available retail.
If you are one of the people who got fibromyalgia from taking Prilosec or omeprazole, then I suggest sticking to magnesium lycinate glycinate, which will not remove the toxin created, I'm calling it a toxin but it's probably the wrong term, won't remove it at too fast a speed for your body to adapt, that's what I have to do. Where there is little but skin above bone I can use anything I want, the scalp and the tops of my toes.
Skin absorption is supposed to be faster with psoriatic skin, and I find this to be true for me. Things that normally don't absorb do absorb there, but the skin on the toes of my right foot has all become psoriatic to encourage further absorption. I'm going to have to trade feet.
Apple cider vinegar will help your body adapt according to my experience and according to my pain management doctor it helps change gene expression using lactic acid. Exercise to exhaustion helps with fibromyalgia, and it also causes lactic acid buildup and tells the body it needs to be able to exercise hard as well. You don't want to do too much apple cider vinegar as a couch potato or your body will change gene expression to being a couch potato, so use it during or just before or just after exercise as well. I use it after food so my body can adapt to the changes in my diet. It really helps with the pain for me.
The difference between magnesium spasms for me and copper spasms is that copper spasms look like tourette's syndrome, which may therefore be an inability to use copper to block the glutamate receptors. That means twisting around.
Magnesium spasms for me tend to be back and forth. For me it's often the belly muscles whivh jack knifes me rather than twists me. I double up rather than twisting usually for me to the left.
I have noticed that whatever part I relax first is the one that spasms. It is as if the cortisol that is commonly high in patients with fibromyalgia and optimizes the blood so that you can fight a cave bear, or whatever, which goes with adrenaline, but that if I relax that one spot that area gets less cortisol and suddenly there's less of whatever I am short on at that one area. So I relax my foot and it spasms, I relax my shoulder and it spasms.
if I meditate my whole body used to twist up until I started taking more copper. Again, more gabapentin to balance. It moved me up to 300 mg, and then the horizant meant that it didn't shift and get more and less between the doses.
They only gave me three capsules of gabapentin per day and they only last 7 hours in the body. Because they think it is a pain medication like aspirin, they figure that when you're asleep it shouldn't be a problem. but the fact that it prioritizes magnesium to the brain and increases ceruloplasm and means that when it runs out while we sleep, we go through withdrawal symptoms. So I had to get four capsules per day.
And because I know I have a shortage of usable copper that the body can't deal with, wearing copper bracelets at night, whether it's slow absorption or simply making the body more aware of copper in general, maybe homeopathically, but those four copper bracelets and two copper infused calf supports mean that I wake up feeling okay, or at least much more okay than I used to.
Either magnesium or copper deficiency can create a direct cramp. I'd make a guess that goes for calcium as well.
Diagnostically, if Epsom salts don't make you better or worse it's more likely copper. If they make it better it's more likely magnesium. If they make it worse it's more likely calcium. That's not anything other than a rule of thumb that I found for myself, your mileage will definitely vary. but at least it's something to start off with to modify to fit your experience.
As far as absorbing copper goes in my case, if you've got the omeprazole form, I have to use skin absorption because my intestines know that there's enough copper in me because there's this modified form it can't use but it also can't perceive as being unusable. For me I use garlic and ionic copper in a roller top bottle, the ionic copper is liquid and I just shake them up together.
If your fibromyalgia started at menopause, then it's more likely that your body is still absorbing too much iron as it learned to do when your period started, and this would go along with having sweating which gets rid of extra iron. At that point, I'm not sure about food absorption or taking copper pills, and remember that whatever you take you should start taking a little at a time, and if it is beneficial you can work up, but if your body needed to catch up on its absorption, and a certain point you're going to end up with that dose that you have found to work best suddenly being too much and getting new symptoms that you won't recognize. And then you need to back off, maybe way way off.
And if you have any condition like blood pressure or diabetes, where you are taking a medication, if you find the right string and pull it, all the problems may go away. at which point you're going to start to have too much medication and a new problem.
My sister refused to deal with doctors even with diabetes, handling it with a lot of emotional support and diet. And a lot of nutritional supplements. then she moved to a place with hard water about 6 months before covid in america, so that was like March of 2020. And she had congestive heart failure, enlarged left ventricle as well from diabetes, and she figured she was dead soon.
I called her up last November when I found out about silica increasing cereoplasmin and helping with bone density and building joints, and skin and hair and nails after my thumbnail became smooth after 6 days taking silica, and boy wasn't I surprised! It used to have longitudinal ridges. The other hand still do, I figure my body was letting me know this is a good thing but now is using the silica for other things. It does a lot in the body, it's even the hardest part of the teeth. Who knew?
I called her up last November, that's 2021, saying hey, I may have found something that will help your heart condition, that's via the ceruloplasmin controlling copper and making more usable copper available to the mitochondria supposedly. Then you don't need as many cells to pump the heart. Supposedly.
And she used to sound horrible, irritable and irritating, and nothing was good enough and she had a weird tone to her voice.
And the tone is gone, and she says, oh, the heart problem went away.
Wtf?
So I casually ask her, what's the water like where you live now anyway? And she says, oh my gosh, the water comes like powder out of the tap it's so hard.
She's got silica and calcium and magnesium in her water which she drinks and washes in if there's some skin absorption involved, and possibly zinc and lithium and who knows what, and her health conditions reversed. I haven't asked about the diabetes, but she sounds amazing and it turns out that silica is supposed to bind to aluminum as well and reduce that cause of Alzheimer's. so maybe it was Alzheimer's she had coming on. Mom used a lot of aluminum in cooking.
The research I found by Liu that's on the other phone and not yet transferred to this one listed calcium, magnesium, and two other nutrients in the title as being deficient in the hair mineral analysis of patients with fibromyalgia. The article also included copper as a fifth.
And the research I've seen about the circadian rhythm shows that the body does different things at different times, kind of like stop lights, or like magnesium being for stress and during the day we go through various stresses but at night it is used for call it clean up chores.
And I've seen a ton of research saying that serum nutrient test can be unreliable. Uwe Gröber magnesium and drugs, use that and ncbi to search and get the article, is the one that I've memorized the name of.
serum nutrient testing can only act as a snapshot for what you are after you've done the exercise of getting to the car, getting the sunlight that increases antioxidants, the hope that may make you happy and increase antioxidants, the social and emotional support, hopefully, from the staff at the clinic, and likewise fear of needles can mess up serum nutrient testing, I have a fear of needles and my lithium test showed normal for about 13 years, while I was getting kidney damage. I was finally diagnosed with a lithium overdose over the phone by symptoms when I couldn't make it to the clinic, and at that point because it clears through the kidneys I was drinking 6 to 9 gallons of water. I didn't realize how much it had changed over 13 years because lithium interferes with thinking correctly and the change was so gradual.
I have no clue which laboratory was used by Liu, not even which country, or how to tell whether a laboratory is good or not, but a hair mineral analysis by a good reputable lab who's doing it right and not over washing the hair so the iron leaves it, that's the one thing I remember running into, and you should get iron checked as well if you have fibromyalgia, and as many minerals and nutrients as possible. At which point suddenly the hair mineral analysis is liable to be less expensive than the individual tests.
And remember that if you decide to go for magnesium or calcium that you have to bring them both up together, too much of one or the other if both are low and you're looking at cardiac problems.
And if you search cardiac fibromyalgia ncbi, that gives you a peer-reviewed document resource, you will find article after article including tilt tables proving that your heart is different from others and therefore fibromyalgia is real, if you need that proof, and Maitland spinal mobilization being beneficial even I guess it was weeks or months afterwards, and I now make a point to keep my lower back and neck mobile, seeing as the nerves go in the neck to the brain, and little pinches supposedly, and my experience supports, block messages that we don't perceive but our brain does for how to use our muscles so that our joints stay in alignment. I got that from chiropractic, and all I know is that I am much better off when I can get my neck completely clear and able to move comfortably. Then my body seems to be able to guide me to what's good for me by making me crave things or by making me not want to put something in my mouth.
and that goes back to when they put me on vitamin D for a deficiency and hold me to take 30,000 units a week, and wanted me to take one capsule a week. It had corn oil in it and I'm allergic, so I suggested a daily dose that came up to 1/7 of that, and I did that for months and it got to where I couldn't bring the capsule to my mouth without getting ill in my body like screaming don't do that, the muscles fighting me.
So I called the doctor and I said maybe I better do that once a week since trying to do this is so agonizing, and he said oh, you're still on the remedial dose? You were supposed to go on to the maintenance dose months ago.
Nobody told me. But my body hoisted a middle finger, if you'll pardon the phrasing, and let me know that I needed to stop.
I know that some people don't like drinking water plain. I ran into some research, long ago, showing that water helps the kidneys clear but any other liquid doesn't encourage them the same way. I never had a problem before but once I got fibromyalgia and found an iron deficiency through dips in my fingernails, the doctor told me it was a deficiency, I looked it up, he tested it.
But I noticed that I couldn't drink plain water anymore comfortably. So my guess is that if there's a deficiency in something that exits through the kidneys, the body will encourage itself to cut back on water or to drink things that don't encourage the kidneys.
I was given something that made the kidneys function better and had my first heart attack.
Turns out I was dreadfully deficient in copper. Does it go out through the kidneys? I don't know, maybe it was something else.
But I learned to respect that if I'm not wanting to drink water, it means I need to figure out what I'm short on. And if suddenly water becomes more comfortable to drink, then maybe I found it.
The newer cars come with something you can plug into them that will tell you what's wrong with them. I'm thinking of asking God to do a retrofit and give one for us as well. But if my brain gets the right signals through the spine and the neck, it seems to be able to give me better cravings and tell me what not to do more easily.
I don't know how much you can use that, and if it's some of your nutrient then the three I know about, then I suggest checking out things like pink salt that has tons of nutrients, the little micronutrients that we don't think about and may not even know the names of. It's supposed to be higher in silica as well, and so is sugar. If you crave sugar, maybe it's the silica. Maybe not.
And maybe I go on too long. Hope that's helpful somehow.
Wow, thank you - that is very thorough 🥰
I have a meeting with my new GP this week and will discuss the iron/copper/magnesium levels. I’m currently on gabapentin for abdominal pains, so I will be discussing all of my medications with him.
I’d say the root cause of fibro for me was a traumatic event earlier in my life, as the symptoms have been around for a very long time, but have been so gradual that I didn’t realise they were linked.
That said, it seems to have accelerated in the last five years or so and I had a full hysterectomy three years ago, when I was 33, so it could also be linked to that. I have to take HRT, as I had the op so young, but I will discuss all my options with the doctor this week.
Thank you again and I hope you’re doing ok - sending hugs 💙
When I get cramps it's always due to not drinking enough, not from supps. Like dJolinar I don't tolerate much pure water or tea (pee frequency), so I drink soy milk/drink, or since MCAS almond milk/drink.
Muscle spasms
Muscle spasms
Muscle spasms
Muscle Spasms!
Hurrendous muscle spasms
