My right shoulder

[nancylebov]

A month or so ago, I was having trouble with my right shoulder. It hurt when I made certain movements, and it wasn't an ordinary overuse muscle ache. It was a somewhat sickening pain, and it didn't have a precise location, though I could tell it was my right shoulder and didn't seem to be the joint. It felt almost like being attacked from above and to the right, rather than something which was entirely internal. Did you know your shoulder is involved if you adjust your waistband? Neither did I.

As pain goes, it was just fairly bad rather than extreme, but it was cutting into my quality of life.

One of my friends suggested kindly and tactfully that the problem might be because I'm fat. I'm not being sarcastic and neither was he--he said it quite gently. And I know and accept that I'm fat, and I believe fat is a descriptor rather than necessarily an insult. He expanded on it by saying that maybe fat was interfering with the natural function of my shoulder.

Still, I'm 4'11 and 170 pounds--this is definitely not thin, but I'm not fat enough to significantly affect my range of movement, and especially not for my arms.

He's an intelligent guy, but that was a remarkably stupid suggestion. It's not exactly his fault, since we live in a society which is remarkably stupid about fat. If you live surrounded by craziness, some of it is likely to rub off.

I felt a weird distant sort of anger.

I don't know if that was what pushed me towards really paying attention to my shoulder, but when I focused on it more carefully, it became clear that all the pain was in the deltoid.

I did some gentle movement. This means I paid attention to where the range of painless movement was, moved gently within that range, and then very carefully relaxed as I pushed into the edges of the painless range. It took several session of this (I wasn't timing it, but they weren't very long) over two days to completely clear up the pain. Of course, I was just as fat at the end of the two days as I was at the beginning.

That sort of gentle movement takes more attention and willpower than I generally give to anything. I had to override any impulse to yank on my shoulder (see! it still hurts!) or to space out. On the one hand, I don't want to make a big deal about how hard such movement is--I bet it isn't hard for everybody--but on the other, it was that hard for me, and I both feel smug about having it work and believe that some people need to know that it's going to take higher than average focus.

I've used gentle movement (both guiding people through movements and talking them through) for other muscle pains, but it was mostly pain from overuse or cramps.

Gentle, attentive movement for muscle pain could become a folk remedy, and I hope this post encourages people to try it and talk about it.

I still don't know what caused that shoulder pain, nor what gave it that weird sickening quality. Western hypothesis: there's a neurological connection between the shoulder and the gut. Eastern hypothesis: there's a meridian connection.

As for the fat thing, it could have been a lot worse. I've seen more than enough accounts of people (I'm not sure if it's always women) who have serious and/or painful problems who get told by their doctors that the problem will go away if they lose weight. This can have deadly consequences.

If you think a problem is caused by fatness, I suggest at least checking to see whether it's more pervasive among fat people than thin and whether it reliably goes away when people lose weight. Do not go by the common sense/social hypnosis idea that fat is a major cause of ill health and losing weight will make just about anything better. Here's the NYTimes being somewhat surprising about fat and diabetes:

Obesity does increase the risk of developing diabetes, but the disease involves more than being obese. Only 5 percent to 10 percent of obese people have diabetes, and many with diabetes are not obese. To a large extent, Type 2 diabetes is genetically determined — if one identical twin has it, the other has an 80 percent chance of having it too. In many cases, weight loss can help, but, as Mr. Smith has learned, most who lose weight are not cured of the disease. He lost 40 pounds but still has diabetes.

“Everybody in the act of losing weight will have a pretty dramatic improvement pretty quickly,” said Dr. C. Ronald Kahn, a diabetes researcher and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Blood sugar levels drop precipitously and the disease seems to be under control. But that is because the metabolic process of weight loss lessens diabetes. Once weight is lost, he added, and people stabilize at a lower weight, their diabetes may remain.

With a little luck this post will show up on fatspherenotes, a feed mostly of fat acceptance entries--the most recent few entries are also listed at Fat Fu.

Comments

Iamire your restrant

[wolfdancer.livejournal.com]

for not decking this person out right.
I am glad that movement and streching has helped.
Having worked on your more than a few times, I know that sort of work that you do, and the stress that you are under, and No, I can say that it is not due to being fat. You are by no means THAT FAT, nor would your problems be from that.
If one more person tells me that all of my problems are going to go away if I just lost the fat, I am going to deck them.
My sister is a size 4, she is not able to hold on to weight, and she is developing the same TN and health problems that I am.
SIGH.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Fat has become the latest diagnosis that resolves all things and puts the blame on the victim. Because -- as we all know -- you're only fat if you want to be.

_sigh_

(For those who don't know me, the second sentence is sarcasm. I'm in perfect shape, in that "spherical" is considered a perfect shape.)

[mazzie.livejournal.com]

thanks for this.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

My sympathies for your shoulder--I assume you saw about my run-in with shoulder pain this week. And thanks for the pointer about the Times diabetes article.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Yes, and sympathies on your shoulder--how's it doing?

One of my Feldenkrais books from the 80s said that doctors weren't good at soft tissue stuff--sounds like things haven't changed much.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's fine--the extra day of bed-rest helped immensely.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Whoops, hit "send" too soon.

Well, as I said in my write-up, pulmonary embolism is very hard to diagnose symptomatically--any symptom it generates could be something else instead.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I have this wild fantasy that there could be a fast cheap safe way of quickly establishing if a pain is caused by muscle tension or somesuch. It might be doctors who are well-trained in seeing how people sit/stand/move.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Physical therapists and sports trainers (properly-trained ones, anyway) are good at this.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Ouch! I'm glad you got the better of this. Gentle stretching is always good.

Since the shoulder isn't a weight-bearing joint, I'm at a loss to see what fat has to do with this--the only fat I know of that can cause shoulder problems are unusually large breasts, and this is not something that relates to the size of the rest of the body.

Be wary of any burning pain, as this may be a sign of a nerve injury.

False linkages

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

FWIW, my mother had shoulder pain which got pretty bad. It turned out to be a bone spur in her shoulder, caused by her being fat -- indirectly! She is large-breasted, and the underwires rode on her ribs until they caused a spur. But weight loss didn't heal it, of course; that took surgery.

As an aside, as I have been suffering from shoulder pain + nausea, I found a link between the two...gall stones. Gall stone pain can refer into the shoulder. I don't know if that fits your symptoms but it's one (improbable) lead. It wasn't what I had, but it made some sense.

thoughts on this in no particular order

[nosebeepbear.livejournal.com]

For a long time, every time I heard of you reading/writing about "fat acceptance," I was mildly surprised, because people interested in fat acceptance are generally fat, and you're so clearly not. Even more surprised years later when I figured out you actually identify as "fat." This is one among many reasons that I am flabbergasted that it would even occur to someone that your shoulder pain might be from weight (and unless one does an inordinate number of push-ups, I can't even imagine what anyone's weight would have to do with it).

I've been told many times (by DOCTORS, as well as well-meaning friends) that fat is my problem. Fat may very well be exacerbating some of my problems (my knee, certainly), and in those cases it's reasonable to say losing weight would help, but that doesn't mean it explains anything or that losing weight will "cure" me. What I find particularly exasperating about the tendency to "diagnose" people this way is that there are *so many* conditions which can *cause* someone to gain weight, and still it doesn't occur to doctors that a fat person might have a medical issue.

re diabetes: losing weight can not only improve your chances of not getting it, but can improve blood sugar control if you have it. No, losing weight does not eliminate the possibility, or cure you once you have it, but diabetes is one case where weight loss can make a serious health difference.