Sitting bone pain and heel pain

The history of my pain

This documents the pain of an injury that goes mostly uncared for by the doctors, since they don’t really perceive it as an injury. About 20 years back I hurt my tail bone. I cannot really remember the cause. For one, I do remember that I fell backwards while playing basketball and landed on my tail bone. I also remember that I might have hit my tail bone against the edge of some chair. Either way I hurt my tail bone.

When I went to the doctors back then, they asked me to use a donut shaped cushion. This did help. But my pain was spread out. It was in the lower back, the coccyx and most painfully also in the sitting bones. The sitting bone pain was the most devastating. It meant I could not sit on a chair for long. I could not ride my motorcycle or any other two wheeler vehicle. Forget even touching a bicycle with its next to nothing cushioning. This painful state began in 2004 and has not really left me.

Now the pain subsided around 2012 because I did not work long hours on the computer. Around 2013 I practiced Yoga regularly and also went for long walks. This helped quite a bit to make the pain almost go away. I even had started riding a bicycle between 2017 and 2018. In 2019 when I was on a flight back from SFO I had a extreme pain in my sitting bones again. This time around I went back to an orthopedic. He said, welcome to the new world where people use standing desks.

For about 6 months I discovered the joy of standing desks and helped relieve the pain in my sitting bones. However all of a sudden the pain had got down to my achilles and heel. Now I could not walk for long or sit for long. My heel was sore, especially in the night. It felt inflamed. If I hit my leg against some object, my heel would pain ten times more than it normally would.

So here I am, with over 20 years of sitting bone pain and the newly added heel pain. I am so incapacitated that I cannot ride a bicycle, cannot walk for more than 45 minutes on a stretch and have constant soreness in both these regions.

The tried and tested solutions

• Using a donut cushion
• Yoga helps in stretching the hamstrings, glutes, the back of your legs which are shortened thanks to sitting through the day
• Building muscles if you are weak especially in the back, neck and abdomen

The miracle solution

So then I went to a holistic doctor. He said I am going to do “functional myodiagnostics” with you. Those are a bunch of muscle tests that he ran with me. He figured out that there’s some problem with my right jaw. That its not aligning properly. So he prescribed an orthodontic retainer. So here’s the thing. Your teeth are like the most dynamic skeletal parts in the entire body. They move around a lot, especially your lower jaw. It’s like your teeth are swimming the waves created by the rest of your body. Now when you wear a retainer, then its like you are giving them a pool float. So now they are not tossed around as much as before. The jaw muscles are more relaxed.

Well what if the jaws are relaxed? That’s the clincher. There seems to be a direct relationship between the muscles surrounding the temporomandibular joint and the sitting bones. Which ones specifically if you ask – The Pterygoideus muscles. So when you massage these muscles, you feel a loosening and activation of the sitting bone muscles. It’s as if someone is juicing up your painful sitting bones. This immediately relieves the pain which also goes down to the heel! So now not only are my sitting bones relieved, also the pain in my Achilles and my heel is reduced drastically.

I will write more on this topic later to give more exact details of the therapy which I am going through.