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On Feb 2, 2008 9:25 PM, Jim Goodin <jimgoodinmusic@gmail.com> wrote: > getting occasional bouts with tendinitis or > related. Go and let a professional physiotherapist have a check on you! Such symptoms with nerve pain can physically emanate from quite a different part of the body than you feel it in. There's no chance to guess correctly by yourself. A friend of mine had a carpel tunnel syndrome surgery last year and it went very well, he got rid of all his problems. He is a carpenter at his daytime job and a gigging blues player at weekends plus often one night in the week. Both occupations typically associated with the carpel tunnel bug. Some years ago I woke up one night with a horrible pain in my left shoulder, beaming down into my hand and focusing in the ring finger. I had no idea what might have caused this sudden blow. No doctor could tell either. They "guessed" that it was a quite "Pinched Nerve" issue common among people that do body building - but I definitely don't do that! Not until I visited a physiotherapist also experienced in acupuncture the mystery was solved. She only had to look at my back for a couple of seconds to understand the issue. It appeared the pain in the left arm was caused by tiny muscles at the lower back which had deteriorated. The absence of these muscles made the spine bow sideways and then the body automatically compensates for that by bowing to the other side a bit higher up along the spine. This works fine for a couple of years until "the bow" approaches the highest part of the spine where all the ribs are mounted. Up there there is no room for sideways bending and then big nerves may get squeezed badly. Which is what had happened to me. Of course the guitar playing made it worse - especially standing on one leg with bent torso to play with a bow and at the same time tap dancing a floor board with the other foot - but the real cause was my stupid experiment to stop exercising five years earlier. I have always paracticed yoga to focus balance and then started thinking that "what the heck is this good for, I'm in perfect shape and never get ill anyway so I'll do this experiment to quit all exercising just to see if it really is needed. If Milarepa could sit for years in a cave I should be able to sit ten hours a day in a chair and work with typing". Bottom line is that exercise IS needed. The physiotherapist told me I was lucky to bring those tiny muscles back to life again. She glued electrodes to my back and twice a week for one month I received small electric shocks to "massage" the muscles. After only two such treatments they got strong enough to react to nerve impulses so I could take over the exercising by will. For a year I could still feel that there had been a problem inside but then I was fine again. I'm not so sure it's the aging in itself that causes problems but rather the quite unfriendly way we usually treat our bodies as musicians. As long as you are not a professional you may also benefit from the luxury of switching premiere instrument for a while. -- Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen (celebrating 52 years on the planet)