Pain flare-ups ?

[Heorte]

I'm just posting to find out how many other people with chronic pain get similar problems to my own. I have suddenly got an infected tooth and coping with that is relatively ok'ish, but everything else goes berserk. My neck and shoulders are the worst, base of spine, sciatica, then wrists and feet. It's almost like re-ordering the parts list that has most faults! I do understand why this happens, but the reaction is very severe at times, and I wonder if anyone has anything to share on this point?

[earthwitch]

I don't know whats causing your chronic pain, but I know mine is from ankylosing spondylitis (inflammatory spondylarthritis), so when my pain gets beyond what I can cope with, a short course of steroids seems to knock it back to manageable. Of course that would only work for inflammatory type pain, and not for mechanical pain, injury related pain, or even fibro pain. Have you ever seen a pain specialist? If your normal meds work normally, then they may be able to advise what you can use for this kind of breakthrough pain.

[Heorte in reply to earthwitch]

yes, I should have mentioned I'm an old 'chronic' with O.A, DDD in two thirds of spine with resulting neuropathies etc. It's more to do with finding out if there are others out there who are particularly sensitive to infections, I know this is prevalent amongst people with RA, but O.A ?

[johnsmith]

We all have a stress breakdown point. The stress breakdown point is the point at which the body begins to experience overload conditions.

When you are a chronic pain sufferer you have increased stress and can have a stress quite closed to the stress breakdown point. So when you add another stressor that takes you above the stress breakdown point the body as an engineering system starts to experience overload conditions and mentally and physically starts to fall apart.

I try to avoid this happening by looking for low level stresses that I can eliminate when I have an extra stressor.