Why You Get Fibromyalgia Chest Pain And What To Do About It

Can people with fibromyalgia experience chest pain? You bet, they can.

Here’s why. Once trigger points accumulate within muscles, they release chemicals that produce pain in the body. The pain can then radiate to different spots in the body. For example, a trigger point in the knee could refer pain to the hip or to the back. A trigger point in the shoulder could refer pain to the neck or down the arm to the elbow.

Muscles line the rib cage. They assist with lifting and lowering the chest during breathing. If these muscles develop tender trigger points, they will cause fibromyalgia chest pain or pain that occurs during breathing. Pressing on these trigger points and eliciting pain is the only way to diagnose them; they’ll never show up on a chest x-ray or other imaging study. And so far, there’s no type of lab test that can be performed that is confirmatory for trigger points.

What To Do for Fibromyalgia Chest Pain

Fibromyalgia chest pain is one of those symptoms that can be quite alarming. Any time you have chest pain, it’s a good idea to get it checked out at the doctor’s office to rule out other more serious reasons for chest pain such as heart disease – angina, heart attack or congestive heart failure.

When someone has fibromyalgia chest pain – or any other type of fibromyalgia pains in the body, the solution is really to eliminate the trigger points causing the pain. There are massage therapy techniques called trigger point release therapy that may be used for this purpose. In this therapy, a trigger point is located and then pressed until it ‘dissolves’. Another name for this type of treatment is myofascial release therapy.

The massage therapist has to press deep enough to increase the pain level to about a 5 on the pain scale between 0 and 10 where 0 is equal to no pain and 10 is the maximum amount of pain that any human could ever experience. It’s quite uncomfortable to have the trigger points pressed, even though the pain level is only rated a 5.

After the first trigger point has dissolved, the massage therapist then hunts for the next trigger point, and repeats the same process. One massage session may work on five or more trigger points and also include some general massage strokes to relax the rest of the body.

After the massage session, the fibromyalgia patient will feel a little like a jellyfish and there will be some soreness that lasts for the next few days. It’s important to drink a lot of water during this time. Water flushes out the toxic byproducts that were held in the fibromyalgia trigger point. After a few days, the patient will feel as if she is free from the pain. The pain leaves when the trigger point dissolves.

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