I have blamed my shoes, a headache, the drive home and not sleeping well. Every time it was the same spot under my right shoulder blade.
I have never once said the real sentence out loud. I am going to type it instead, where my sister can read it.
Last Updated Aug 14, 2026
Estimated 3 minute read
There is a photograph from a wedding where everybody is sitting down and I am standing at the back of the room.
I told my sister it was my shoes.
The chairs had a metal bar across the back at exactly the wrong height, and I worked that out about a minute after I sat in one. Shoes are an acceptable thing to have wrong with you at a wedding. Nobody asks a follow up question about shoes.
That is one of four. The others are a headache, the drive home, and not sleeping well. I know it is four because I sat down on Sunday night and counted them.
The real answer is a spot on my right side, in the gap between my shoulder blade and my spine, about two fingers off the bone. Tight in the morning, worse by the evening. There is something under the skin there that does not belong and it has been under there for years.
That is one sentence long. I have never got it out.
I do not have a clean reason for it. The first few times it was because it sounded like nothing, and it is nothing, it is an ache, people have worse. Then it had gone on long enough that saying it would have meant explaining why I had not said it before. After that it was simply easier to have bad shoes.
Which means a stranger is about to get the whole thing, in order, and my sister has had shoes.
I did the ordinary things. A chiropractor for one winter, then a different chiropractor when the first one moved. Massages every six weeks, which I called a treat so I did not have to work out what I was spending. A foam roller under the bed that has to be moved every time the sheets get changed. A bath towel rolled up and knotted, from a video, which I still do sometimes.
I would do all of it again, in the same order.
Something is different since the spring. I have not told anybody that either, which is what finally got me sitting here typing.
I put my coat on with both arms at once. I did not know I had stopped doing that.
My sister sent me a photograph from another wedding in June and I am sitting down in it, in the middle of a row, near the front.
My purse goes on the right shoulder again. I did not decide that.
It is not gone. If I leave it a week it comes back, not as far, but back. It took most of a month before I would have said anything had changed, and for the first two weeks I thought I had bought one more thing that was going to end up under the bed.
There is one more part of it I have never mentioned to anybody, because it never seemed like it was about my back.
In a parking lot, backing out of a space, I twisted around and my head ended up pushed over toward my left shoulder, and the spot on my right side let go. Only for a second. I did it again to check and it did it again.
I have been able to do that for over a year.
I never thought of it as information.
If you have the same one, you already know it by heart.
Six things. How many are yours?
However many you just ticked, that is not how many problems you have.
That was mine for two years. All six of them.
It never occurred to me to ask whether those were six problems or one.
1. Two chiropractors, two winters
One for a winter, then a different one when the first moved practice.
It is a very easy appointment to make. You give a reception desk a spot on your back and nobody asks you how long it has been there, or why you waited, or what you have been telling people in the meantime.
Walking out I felt taller for about an afternoon. By the second day it was back in the same place.
I booked the next one before I left, both winters, and I would do it again.
2. A massage every six weeks, which I called a treat
That is the word I used. Out loud, to my sister, more than once.
A treat is a thing you do not have to justify and do not have to add up, and I want to be honest that both of those were the point.
She finds it without being told where it is. Every single time. I have never asked myself what it means that a stranger can find it in under a minute and I have never once described it to anybody who knows me.
It was the best thing I had, and it was gone by the time I got home.
3. The foam roller under the bed
It has to be moved every time the sheets get changed, which is the only time anybody else in the house sees it.
You lie on it and roll along the spot and it hurts in the way you have decided counts as working.
It reaches the surface, and the surface was already the loudest part of this.
4. A bath towel, rolled and knotted, from a video
No receipt, no appointment, nothing to explain, and I still do it sometimes.
You roll a towel, tie a knot in the middle of it, lie back over the knot and let your own weight do the pressing.
It is the cheapest thing on this list and it works exactly as well as the ninety dollar version, which I should probably have found more interesting at the time than I did.
5. And the appointment I never made
A doctor was always the obvious thing, and I have never been near one about this.
Not because I think they would be unkind or useless. Because the first question is how long has this been going on.
And the honest answer to that question is the sentence I have spent years not saying, with the number attached to it.
So I picked treatments a person can have without ever saying it out loud, and then I was surprised that none of them were the one that worked.
Four things I paid for, and one I never booked.
Every single one of them could be done without saying the sentence out loud. That was not a coincidence. That was the criterion.
And not one of them ever went near my neck.
What finally broke the rule was not a doctor. It was a physical therapist who specialised in cervical spine. Not a general physio. Someone who works with nerve and spine conditions specifically.
I had to say the sentence out loud to a stranger to get there. I had just run out of ways not to.
She watched me move for a few minutes, pressed a few spots in my neck, and turned her screen around.
It was a diagram of the cervical spine. The vertebrae in the neck, with nerves branching out from between each one like roots from a tree.
"These nerves don't just stay in your neck," she said. "This one branches out and runs along the inner edge of your shoulder blade and down your arm. When a disc in your neck shifts and presses on it, the pain shows up wherever that nerve goes."
She pointed at my shoulder blade.
"That knot you keep pressing on isn't a muscle problem. It's where that nerve ends up."
- 1A disc in your neck presses on the nerve root. Everything below starts here.
- 2You feel it at the inner edge of your shoulder blade. That is where the pain shows up, not where it starts.
- 3Sometimes it carries on down the arm.
Then she explained why nothing I had ever done had held. She drew it as a circle, because that is what it is.
The loop I had been in for two years
- 1
A disc in my neck presses on the nerve root. All day, every day.
- 2
The muscles along that nerve clamp down to protect it. That is the knot, and that is why it feels like something solid under the skin.
- 3
I dig into the knot. The muscle lets go.Held: about forty minutes
- 4
The disc is still pressing. So the muscle gets the signal to tighten right back up.
And I am back at step one, working on the muscle that is reacting instead of the nerve causing the reaction.
Everything I had put down to bad luck turned out to be the same one thing.
I did not say anything about the parking lot. I worked it out while she was still talking. Tilting my head the other way opens the same gap she was pointing at, for about a second, which is exactly how long it ever lasted.
Heat on its own does nothing to decompress a nerve root. Neither does vibration. Aimed at the knot while the nerve is still being squeezed, they buy about forty minutes. My entire evening routine, explained in one sentence.
What actually takes the pressure off, she said, is decompression, and it has an angle. Most cheap neck stretchers use a random angle and either do nothing or make the pinch worse. The one I had seen advertised for thirty dollars did not name an angle at all.
What the research actually says
In 2006 a team published fifty cases in the journal Spine. Every patient had pain in the neck or around the shoulder blade. Every one of them had surgery on a single compressed nerve root in the neck. Nobody operated on the shoulder blade.
70%
35 of the 50 felt it in the neck or shoulder blade first92%
46 of the 50 lost the pain once the nerve root was freedIn the seventy percent, the neck or the shoulder blade came first by months, before anything showed up in the arm or the fingers. On average it had been there more than seven months.
And the spot told the surgeon where to look. Pain between the shoulder blades pointed to the lower two roots in the neck.
Nobody touched the knot. It stopped because the thing sending it stopped.
Tanaka Y, Kokubun S, Sato T, Ozawa H. “Cervical roots as origin of pain in the neck or scapular regions.” Spine, 1 August 2006, volume 31, pages E568 to E573.
PubMed, PMID 169241931
The angle is 26 degrees
That is the number she gave me. It is the same approach a spine clinic uses to take pressure off a nerve root.
Then she told me what those machines cost a clinic to buy. Twelve to fifteen thousand dollars. That is the whole reason this has always been something you drive to instead of something you own, and it is why a session runs what it runs.
What to look for, if you look at anything else
She was clear that the angle is not a setting you turn up or down. A key that is the right shape opens the lock. One that is close does not open it a little, it does not open it at all. Traction at the wrong angle is not a weaker version of the right thing. It is a different thing, and on a nerve that is already pinched it can make the day worse.
And decompression on its own is only one of the three. Take the pressure off but leave the muscle cold and tight and it clamps back down within the hour, which is exactly what my heat pad had been proving to me every evening for two years.
She mentioned that a group of physical therapists and cervical spine engineers had built a home version. The same 26-degree angle, the same heat, the same vibration, in a single device, fifteen minutes a day, without the appointments. It is called FisioRest.
It wasn't another pillow, another appointment, or another thing to dig into my shoulder blade. It was the first thing that went after the nerve instead of the knot.
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What the fifteen minutes actually does
Everything in that drawer did one thing. Heat, or vibrate, or dig in. Not one of them took the pressure off the nerve, and this does all three at the same time, which is the whole difference.
Takes the pressure off
The 26 degree curve stretches the neck out and holds it in the curve it is meant to have, which takes the load off the nerve root. This is the one that stops the signal being sent.
Gets underneath
Heat raises blood flow into the deep muscles running along that nerve, the ones a pad on the surface never reaches. Three levels.
Lets go of the hold
Vibration releases the tension those muscles had been holding for years, once they finally have a reason to release it. Three intensities.
Artuvate's own product renders. Tap between the three.
That is why the heat pad on the sofa never held. It was warming a muscle that was about to clamp down again, because the nerve under it was still being pinched. Take the pressure off first and the muscle has a reason to stay loose.
Fifteen minutes, once a day
I lie back on the bed. My head rests into the cradle. One button, and I pick the heat and vibration level.
Fifteen minutes, usually in the evening. Nothing to learn, nothing to book, nothing to remember to reorder.
What the first month was actually like
Nothing happened for two weeks.
I did the fifteen minutes most evenings. Every few days I reached back and pressed on the spot to see whether it was any different, and it was not. By the end of the second week I had decided I would finish the month out and then it could go under the bed with the foam roller.
I had the vibration on the highest of the three settings that whole time, because I assumed harder was better. That is what I had assumed about the roller, and about the towel, and about every hand that has ever been on it. I turned it down in the third week and liked it more.
There was no day it turned. Somewhere around the fifteenth I noticed it was not there all the time, which is not the same as gone, and it is the most I am willing to say about it.
It still flares. It settles quicker than it used to, and I do the fifteen minutes most days now instead of waiting until I need it.
The first thing I noticed was something I had stopped doing, not anything I could feel.
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I called it a treat so I would not have to add it up
So here it is, added up, which I have been carefully not doing for years.
Bars are drawn against the largest figure here.
$89
And that bar never grows
Not a month, not a session. Then it's yours, and you use it every night if you want.
The table above only counts one year of the massages. The real number is over three thousand dollars and I am not going to be more precise than that, because precise is not the problem. Every one of them worked. None of them lasted.
Set against that, eighty nine dollars was not really a decision. It is the only line on that list that does not come back every month. And if it did nothing, I had a year to send it back.
He put a number on it, which is the thing I spent years not doing.
"This seems to really be helping… hundreds of dollars each week by reducing my visits to the chiropractor for decompression treatments."
Luke S. Verified
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Three people who had already given up
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You get 365 days to send it back. I ordered it and told myself not to expect anything, because nothing else had held and I had no particular reason to think this would. You don't have to expect anything either. You just have to try one more thing.
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P.S. The bit that took me two years. The knot is not where the problem is. It is where the problem is being sent. Every hour you spend working on the shoulder blade is an hour spent on the wrong end of the same nerve.
One note before you order. FisioRest combines traction, heat and vibration. If you have had cervical surgery, a recent neck injury, or you are being treated for a diagnosed spinal condition, speak to your doctor before using it. Numbness, weakness or pins and needles running down the arm or into the hand is worth having looked at rather than treated at home.
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