Worried. MS or health anxiety?

New diagnosis and before diagnosis
1

Hi everyone,

Hope you’re all well.

I am a 31 year old male.

Apologies for the long message, I just need somewhere to vent and hopefully some advice and/or reassurance.

It all started around 6-8 weeks ago. After a home workout involving lifting weights I noticed that I was getting pins and needles in my right arm on and off for a few days. This stopped, and progressed to aching especially in the shoulder and arm.

I spoke to my GP who diagnosed ‘probable’ muscle/tendon/nerve injury due to either home work out with weights or some repetitive strain from office work.

I told my GP that my arm felt weak and I was worried about MS or MND after googling, she did some basic strength test and confirmed she was happy it was ok.

My arm discomfort/ache has become more intensified and more often since then.

I decided to visit a Chiropractor to see if they could help.

At my initial consultation he noted that my right arm was weaker than my left after doing comparison tests. I am right handed so this is my dominant arm. He diagnosed a pinched nerve in my neck and advised a treatment plan.

I can still do everything I always have on a day to day basis, my arm just either feels weak, strange or aches. Is this classed as clinical weakness? And also consistent with MS based on my right arm being weaker than the left?

My arm does feel weak and aches more, and is more noticeable since he pointed this out. I can’t tell whether my right arm being weaker than my left means anything substantial?

I have also noticed that sometimes my lip and tip of my tongue feels slightly numb. Not numb enough to stop feeling, but strange. This isn’t constant and comes and goes. it’s happened maybe 3 times over the past week for 10 mins a time.

On a night when I am in bed trying to sleep, I feel like my legs are vibrating inside. It is not visible, but a feeling. I also get weak legs feeling when walking or standing. I have learnt through google that these can be signs of anxiety, but also something more sinister. As I’ve been anxious for the past few weeks I have been restless and constantly bouncing/moving my legs during the day.

After googling I am convinced that I now have MND or MS. I am terrified.

I haven’t slept properly for weeks, on average 3-4 hours broken sleep a night. I have no appetite and I feel constantly sick with worry. I cant concentrate on any aspect of my life, except to research/google and worry.

My partner and Mum have asked me to visit my doctor to seek help for healthy anxiety, which I am fully prepared to do. They are both worried about me and can see the effect this is having on my daily life and mental health.

i have had similar worries about cancer, heart problems and HIV before, but that doesn’t mean that I should just dismiss this. I have physical symptoms at the moment.

I hope I have health anxiety, but at the moment I can’t believe it’s that until I know for sure it’s not MND or MS.

I think part of it is that I have read how difficult these illnesses are to diagnose, especially early on. This adds to the anxiety, also as I feel I just have to live like this and wait to see if anything progresses.

I have never felt this low before and I’m unsure how to move on.

Any help or guidance you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

2

hi

towards the end of your post you said that you have read how difficult these illnesses are to diagnose, which is correct.

your health anxiety will just serve to make it even more difficult.

6 to 8 weeks is not long enough to be thinking of a serious illness.

everyone goes through rough patches.

your GP was right to associate your symptoms to the workout with weights and possible muscle/tendon/nerve injury.

now that your GP is aware of your concerns, s/he will put any future symptoms into context.

My advice is to stop googling everything and to get out of this spiral of anxiety.

Maybe a mild anti-anxiety medication would help.

Amitriptyline is one of these.

take care.

Carole x

3

Hello there, sorry you are getting all of these strange symptoms. All of them that you describe can be caused by literally hundreds of different things and they may well disappear and you’ll never find out what it was.

You could try to lay off of the weights for a while to see if that stops the feeling in your arms.

I got a diagnosis of MS a couple of months ago after first going to my doctor in 2016 with a limp/weak leg. The neurologist pointed out some symptoms that he noticed after he examined me last year that I hadn’t even noticed like the babinski sign, hyperelexia and clonus.

I’d not even noticed those and had never heard of them but as soon as he said this makes me think it’s a central nervous system problem I did exactly what you have done - I hit google.

The latter half of 2019 was utterly miserable because I convinced myself that I had MND. All I can say to you is that you must step away from google, especially if you have anxeity.

I spoke to the neurologist about the diagnosis I had given myself and he had a short but frank word in my ear. In a nutshell, if you are worried about a particular symptom as well as a particular condition you will google the two often. Google is clever and it will learn to associate the two and bring you back all of your worst nightmares in the results.

When a doctor searches for symptoms of and illness etc he/she will look for specific papers and studies etc and they will not be found on google.

I truly hope that you don’t have either MS or MND and that you symptoms go away.

4

Hi, I will tell my story as well. As a teenager, I played various sports, so I was often injured. The worst thing that happened to me then was a broken arm. I recently broke my arm again. This embarrassed me a lot and since then I have started to worry a lot about my health. As soon as something started to hurt me, I immediately ran to the doctor or read on the Internet what it could be. Then my husband realized that I was anxious. So on https://www.enhanceclub.com/ I read about anti-anxiety medications and decided to give it a try. They really helped me and I feel great