My cat decided to get into picture as well. I was taking a footpath and my cat likes to play with the water.
So the muscles between my index finger and thumb are causing me big trouble. It's hard to hold a spatula while cooking or vacuum clean etc as it hurts and my hands are weak.
When the pain is bad I can barely drive as holding the steering wheel hurts a lot.
It's not joint pain , none of my joints ache since going gluten free years ago. The pain doesn't keep me up , I do not take or need pain killers. But it makes me sort of handicapped. It is so disheartening
My hands and wrists have been xrayd years ago but no cause was found and no one cares.
Anyone else having similar problems with painful , aching and cramping muscles on hands?
I hope I am making sense. I am just do disheartened and upset because o have just learned my family thinks I am nothing but lazy.
Written by
Justiina
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First of all I am very sorry your family are not sympathetic. If your family isn't what hope have we got of strangers being so. Fortunately many on this forum have been in the same boat at one time or another and they will support.
Thank you for your Profile which gives a short background. So you have suffered for years and are not on any thyroid hormone replacements.
Many people remain undiagnosed due to their TSH not being 'in range'. Your FT4 and FT3 are low so if I were you I'd trial some T3.
You state you've been ill for years, the one that's bothering you most now is:-
painful , aching and cramping muscles on hands?
Your results were:-
Total T4 4.8 L µg/dL 5-10.8 ug/dL
Free T4 1.2 ng/dL 0.7-2.5
Free T3 3.2 pg/mL 2.5-6.5
So ignoring your TSH (sometimes it never rises) Everything above is not towards the upper part of the range Your total T4 is low (cannot convert to T3 sufficiently) Your T3 is low and it is T3 which drives everything in our metabolism.
I'd plump for a small dose of T3 and I'm not medically qualified but this is a link:
An excerpt from another doctor who was horrified that so many people remained undiagnosed only due to the blood tests and TSH only.
In his capacity as a Consultant Virologist at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham he was referred patients who were thought to have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Myalgic Encephalopathy (ME) and other problems thought to be related to viral infection; he felt that a number of these people had classical signs and symptoms of hypothyroidism and treated them with thyroid replacement with encouraging results. He then started working with a number of General Practitioners to address the possibility that there may be a group of individuals who have normal thyroid chemistry but are suffering from hypothyroidism. The British Medical Journal published a letter in 1997 from Dr Skinner and a number of General Practitioners bringing this to the notice of the medical world.
Dr Skinner’s work involved a specific group of patients who have thyroid chemistry within the reference range but clinical signs and symptoms of disease; he argued that blood tests should not be pivotal in the diagnosis and treatment of hypothyroidism as they had never been validated as a marker of optimal health. Secondly, in this particular group of patients it was not known what their blood test results were when they were healthy therefore using blood tests as the only criteria for diagnosis was not sufficient.
It must be emphasised that Dr Skinner was not doing anything new nor prescribing new medication for the treatment of hypothyroidism; patients were diagnosed and treated for this disease based on clinical signs and symptoms and medical examination before blood tests were established and thyroid replacement using natural preparations was the norm prior to synthetic preparations.
I do think it might have something to do with thyroid especially when the pain has worsened since my ft4 dropped this low. I assume it hasn't changed as when my ft4 dropped I have felt not just fatigued, but really sleepy and sleeping a lot regardless of trying to keep my vitamins and nutrients optimised.
Getting tested privately on next Wednesday. On September 2016 my ft4 was 10.3 in range 10-22 and as it is still in range it didn't cause any action. Will see what happens after next test.
Your FT4 is at the bottom of the range when it should be towards the top not the lowest point and I hope your next test is the earliest possible and fast also although you can drink water. We should be given medication if our levels are at the very bottom. Doctors don't know anything about diagnosing and treating patients.
Have you had your vit d, vit B12, folate and ferritin tested? If these are low, they could cause problems such as this.
You could try taking some magnesium, you don't need to test for that. That could help. Or, try some zinc.
Take good notice of all the other advice that is being given to you, but above all, get a referral from your GP to a hospital that does tests for carpal tunnel syndrome as what you have sounds very familiar to me. The test is not an ultrasound but entails connecting an electrical stimulus to your wrist and monitoring the muscle reactions on a screen. A very simple and quick procedure, followed by a couple of simple ops and you get almost complete relief instantaneously.
Towards the end, I was unable to do any DIY work at all. Now I can paint an entire ceiling with no problems at all. I already have done two of them and a complicated Victorian architrave!
in reply to
Cubital tunnel syndrome causes muscle wastage between the index and thumb.
in reply to
Didn't do that for me. Simply caused severe discomfort in both hands if I did any manual work, especially when overhead. If I had been a surrendering soldier I would have been shot immediately!
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