In combination with my migraines, I have a fair amount of neck and left shoulder pain. I've tried to address this in a number of ways--stretching, physical therapy, massage, icing, lidocaine patches, acupuncture, and trigger point injections.

It's hard to say what works, but I gravitate towards the trigger point injections when I can--they seem to work best, longest, and naturally are the hardest to obtain.

What happens, when the shoulder tightens up, is that pain bounces up to my head and triggers migraines. The theory that my pain management guy was working on was one of a feedback loop--migraine causes shoulder pain causes migraines. So if they're both bad breaking one isn't much help. They need to both be broken.

I tried, at length, to explain this to the staff when I was hospitalised. My shoulder was over 8 on the pain scale, but they didn't want to do anything to it in case they messed with the results of the DHE experiment. Weirdly enough, they gave me dilaudid, which I'd think was more intrusive.

Still, I'm not the professional, so what do I know? As soon as I got out I made an appointment with my GP for the trigger point injections, which he provided without comment. One of the ER doctors at Century City is always open to providing them too. But even my pain management guy, the one who first gave them to me, won't do them anymore.

It's a damned shame, because they don't mess with my head, give me anxiety attacks, and they last a good long time.