Garvary,post about spinal fusion.feel I didn't post successfully

[Garvary]

I had spinal fusion some years ago.surgeon took piece of bone from my hip bone to graft using screws unto my lower spine.I have arthritis everywhere I have a bone!this pain I have now is not my athritic pain.it is like knife pain and sometimes I just howl in pain.it is precisely in the spot I had bone taken from my hip.I have to go through the whole agro of visiting a consultant in order to have a new MRI before I start a pain management programme.I am retired psychologist and later librarian so I have a lot of faith in CBT and hope this programme can help.I have no intention of having yet another operation,I have had two,last one decompression which was supposed to relieve pressure from nerve.it was completely unsuccessful.I feel at my age I just want a pain free life until the end.if I had cancer I would have adequate pain control but with arthritis it is "oh you have a bad back ,so have I ,I can hardly swing a golf club anymore"I want to strangle them.arthritis is so misunderstood .Will post my experiences with pain control.I am on 80 mg.longtec per day,have been for 13 years,May as well be taking an aspirin I have such tolerance to it now.what is wrong with these doctors that they just don't really seem to learn more about the condition.and the policy makers,surely there must be so many people unable to work and using benefits.more money needs to be allocated to this condition

[cyberbarn]

I am sorry to hear of your frustrations with the pain, but you are right, many doctors really don't understand arthritis. For instance it is now seen as an immune problem, and the changes to the joint happen long before the cartilage starts to wear down. Any injury to a joint can trigger an inflammatory reaction that starts us on the road to osteoarthritis long before we develop clinical signs. And surgery is one of those things that can cause inflammation. To stop it progressing they need to find something that stops the molecules at the early stages but they haven't found anything yet.

That means there isn't much they can do but try to deal with the symptoms. You are right, more research and money needs to be put into this, but also more communication with patients. I wonder if they don't talk about this because there has been no breakthroughs yet, but personally I would rather know what they are up to than to be kept in the dark and just told it is wear and tear causing it.

I hope the pain management does help and gives you some relief. It does sound like the pain from the arthritis has now go beyond that and become a disease in its own right. As a psychologist you will know about how pain is processed in the brain, so you will have a head start on that!

Best of luck, and let us know how you get on.

[Hidden in reply to cyberbarn]

Autoimmune? When was that discovered? Could you send me a link please if not to much trouble? I want to see ?if that was discovered before I seen orthopedic Dr or after.thanking you in advance.

[cyberbarn in reply to Hidden]

I didn't say autoimmune, but there are forms of arthritis that are or possibly are. For instance this is a paper from 1990, but it hasn't been cited many times so it might not be one that has stood the test of time ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

However this is from 2011 where researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine and suggests that osteoarthritis is driving by an inflammatory process.

med.stanford.edu/news/all-n...

There are many more research papers that follow these paths, that show that osteoarthritis isn't just wear and tear, there are many other factors.

I hope that helps a bit.

[Hidden in reply to cyberbarn]

Thanks and my apologies I knew you never said it but I thought it was same thing lol,I'm going to have good read at the articles, I was just saying the other day how people suffer for years before most advanced machines pickup damage,the new discovery on the body recently is fascinating

[cyberbarn in reply to Hidden]

More advanced imaging has both good and bad sides. For instance when MRIs became more accessible (when they got them out of the labs and into the hospitals) they started imagining people with lower backache. They found what they thought was the anomaly that was causing it, operated on it, but the patients still had the pain. So then some bright young spark suggested that they scan people who don't have back pain, matching them for age and sex. It turns out that all people of a certain age had this, and it wasn't what was causing the pain at all!

The other thing is what they call 'incidentalomias' where a tumour is found when they are looking for something else. But often these are slow growing tumours that would never bother someone and certainly wouldn't kill them, but having found them they often remove them and administer chemo and radio therapy which ends up shorting the person's life.

So although more advanced machines do pick up more damage, it isn't always a good thing.

[Hidden in reply to cyberbarn]

Yes,I have dercums disease and about to get brain scan so I do understand,my step dad has brain tumour for years and its only grown a millimeter ,not sure if that's what has been causing seizure s before it changed in just that slight size he never had them.what do you make on the white connective tissue discovery?do you think its connected to fibromyalgia?

[cyberbarn in reply to Hidden]

What do you mean by the white connective tissue discovery?

[Hidden in reply to cyberbarn]

Interstitium .that's name of it,the think that's how cancers travel,its white filmy type look to it,it's been in papers and on news this year.

[cyberbarn in reply to Hidden]

The interstitium was always known to be there, it is just that they now think it is fluid filled rather than flat. Will it have a connection to fibromyalgia? It will depend on what is causing fibro. At the moment the cause of Fibro is not known, although they think it is to do with the brain mishandling pain signals. This makes it a postulated syndrome. It is just a collection of signs and symptoms. And those signs and symptoms cross over with many other conditions, diseases and syndromes. For example it could be that Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome or Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder is the actual condition that someone has that is causing symptoms that fit the fibro symptoms.

So they can't really say if the interstitium is connected to fibro until they know what fibro is.

You might want to have a look at this paper. It is heavy going in the middle, but if you just read the abstract and the conclusion it will give you an idea of where things are at the moment with regards to fibro:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...