I've been thinking about the post with the mom who has shooting pains in her
arm, and I dredged up this post from a friend about how problems in other
organs can lead to pain in the arm and neck.  This is bits and pieces from a
much longer email, but includes the relevant parts:

>The night I returned home, I woke up in the middle of the
>night with a stabbing pain in the left side of my neck--felt like a dagger
>was sticking into me.

>It was interesting that
>the pain kept moving--for a while it would be two daggers in the side of my
>neck, then a horrible burning in the muscle that runs from my neck to my
>upper arm, then the burning would move to my arm, then to my shoulder, then
>back to my neck. And on and on.

> He (holistic medical person) told me that
>neck pain that wakes you up in the middle of the night is almost always
>referred pain from problems in the liver or gall bladder, and he gave me
>herbs for that.

>I was still in terrible pain the next day, and I was not going to put up
>with it any longer than I had to, so I went to see [name excised] who told
me that, 90% of the time, neck pain that
>wakes you up in the middle of the night is indeed referred from the
>liver/gall bladder. But usually that kind of pain is on the right, and my
>pain was on the left. He said that 10% of the time, such pain, especially
>when it's on the left, is referred from the stomach, not the liver. He did
>a lot of muscle testing around my stomach, and concluded that I either had
>an ulcer or an incipient ulcer. He pointed out that the fact that the pain
>moved around and did not stay in my neck was a sure sign that it was
>referred from elsewhere, and said that the pain was my body's way of trying
>to get my attention.

Anyway, turned out that she had esophagitis.  After I read this story on my
email, I turned to my 19 year old Miranda and asked her if she ever had
weird pains in her neck or arms, and she said "Yes, every so often I get
these horrible stabbing pains in my arm, like someone is sticking a knife
into me.  They don't last very long, less than a minute, but are terribly
painful.  Why do you ask?"  So I had her read the story above.  She has not
had any of these arm pains since she had her gallbladder removed in
mid-November.

Something else to consider when working with moms who have terrible shooting
pains that don't seem to be related to breastfeeding.

Kathy Dettwyler

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