Monday, November 05, 2007

Physiotherapy assessment

I just had a physiotherapy assessment for chronic neck pain. I also discussed pain I have in my knees, ankles, toes, hips, back and fingers. The physiotherapist agreed with my theory that this was because I'm hyperflexible, and told me to improve my posture and crack my joints less (I do this to relieve pain and also as a habit). I'm glad someone finally listened - I went to a doctor awhile ago about my joint pain when my ankles hurt worse than usual, and he decided to do some useless blood tests for arthritis because he figured since I hadn't mentioned knee pain I couldn't be hyperflexible (even though I actually have knee pain, it just wasn't that bad back then).

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3 Comments:

Blogger Andrea Shettle, MSW said...

Is it just my imagination or does hypermobility seem to be more common among autistic people or something? (At least among people I run across on-line.) Because if it is, then seems to me that it should be prudent to double check autistic people for possible hypermobility as a matter of course.

4:11 PM  
Blogger stevethehydra said...

Yes, me too...

I'm nowhere near able to do what Andrea can with her hands, but i can bend my little fingers back almost to touch my wrists...

ALL my joints crack/click, including my neck in about 5 places. I click them as a stim, for pain relief, and probably just out of habit. My right ankle clicks (very loudly) on every step if i'm walking up stairs.

I get neck pain fairly often, but i'm not sure if it's often enough to call "chronic". My neck pain and neck clicking started after an incident when i was about 18 when i was just walking across my room (as i recall), then heard this hideous sound like wet sand and gravel sliding across a hard surface and had sudden, unbearable pain in one side of my neck that lasted about 2 days. I never went to a doctor because i was even more doctor-phobic then than i am now, but i suspect that might have been some sort of dislocation...

I have fairly "chronic" discomfort in my left shoulder too - although it looks no different to my right shoulder, it always feels somehow subtly "out of place" - not pain as such, just feeling its existence in the way you usually only do when a body part is hurting or actively being used for something... if that makes sense?

Quite a few other non-neurotypical people i know have joint oddities running in their families as well...

Thing is i'm not really sure how there can be a direct link between neurological differences and joint differences... possibly they are not "directly" linked, but genetically linked by being on the same chromosome or something?

No idea if any study has ever been done on that...

10:13 AM  
Blogger Ettina said...

It can be due to hypotonia - which is often neurologically based. The two are associated.
Another possibility is that some gene contributes to both.
It would be interesting to do a study where I test a bunch of autistic and non-autistic people on the hypermobility scale( http://psy.psychiatryonline.org/content/vol45/issue5/images/large/SP3407A1.jpeg ) and see if it really is more common in autistics. It does seem to be.

9:12 AM  

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