Pulled groin muscle. It hurts. What helps?

[Lady_Eboshi]

[QUOTE=GucciJumper;8427408]
Popping is a sign of a hip labral tear. Please get this checked out. Labral tears rarely get better on their own without surgery. It sucks but it’s better to get it fixed so you can enjoy life.[/QUOTE]

Not necessarily. “Popping hip syndrome” can happen both in the front at the hip flexor, where you feel it in the groin, and also over the trochanteric bursa on the outside. VERY common in runners, soccer players and other athletes, sometimes painless, sometimes with pain. Seldom considered a big deal unless debilitating pain makes them look for something else.

There are TONS of things that bounce referred pain all over that part of the body, and many of them originate in the lumbar spine and are almost impossible to conclusively diagnose; imaging studies are well-known to be all but useless except for wealth transfer purposes. They can show you the tons of rattling, nasty jewelry in your back–but they CAN’T tell you which if any of them is the pain generator.

Tendinitis, torn muscle, bursitis, SI joint problems, etc. ALL can take between 8 months and 2 years to heal–like all soft tissue injuries. They actually can hurt more and take longer than a fracture.

Labral tears are the suddenly fashionable Dx, as they’ve literally been recently discovered via advanced imaging, but the surgery to “fix” them is HIGHLY questionable, providing dubious results in relation to the natural healing curve.
It’s also now known that a great many people have labral tears that are asymptomatic–even if they found one it might not be what’s causing your pain.

And if it IS coming from your lower back, there’s really nothing out there shown by Cochrane Collaboration meta-analyses to work any better than aspirins and a heating pad as needed.

I’d rest it as much as possible over the winter, and experiment with stretching exercises that YOU control that gently and carefully take you through your range of motion without bouncing, forcing, or having anyone crank on it. Go read the “Hip Pain Club” thread on Equestrians With Disabilities and you’ll see that the tests and “treatment” may be a lot worse than what you’ve got now.

I’ve got a chronic and recurrent variety but fortunately I can do my chores and ride, albeit a little “carefully” when it’s a-twangin’. Betting on psoas tendinitis, and I’ve opted to skip the medical terrorists and hang with the natural healing process. Your mileage may differ!

Good Luck!

[Jeito]

[QUOTE=purplnurpl;8426402]
Voltaren gel.

And get the human form. Don’t use Surpass. The human drug has an ETOH base instead of being creamy like surpass. It’s absorbed better through our systems.[/QUOTE]

Where do you get it? Canada won’t ship it to the US anymore. It is both outrageously expensive and almost impossible to get here.

[keysfins]

[QUOTE=Jeito;8427911]
Where do you get it? Canada won’t ship it to the US anymore. It is both outrageously expensive and almost impossible to get here.[/QUOTE]

RX from a doctor.

[Jeito]

[QUOTE=keysfins;8427954]
RX from a doctor.[/QUOTE]

Thanks. You mean you fill your RX here, right? Canada doesn’t seem to accept US prescriptions.

[kelsey97]

Time, this is what heals soft tissue injuries. If you ask how I know, I’m happy to tell you!

[Magicboy]

I get voltaren gel with an RX and it’s about $20

[Ponyclubrocks]

Voltaran gel is available over the counter in Canada for about $20. I buy it when I’m in Canada on business. I use about 1 tube a year for various strains and pains.

[SDgumby]

Make an appointment to see your doctor. I was thinking it might be a hernia. I messes around with groin soreness for too long and finally went to the doctor. Lo and behold…it was a hernia which never crossed my mind because I thought of it as something that happens to men.

[naynay117]

I know you think it is a groin pull but any chance it is an overworked psoas? It can be really, really, really uncomfortable. And it can be tightest in the middle front of the hip joint.

I am hypermobile and have an unstable sacrum. It presents as spasming of the psoas in the joint areas. It freakin hurts. And is more painful on my dominant right side.

I can do a manaul release with a forward bend if it is a mid level to mild spasm. When everything gets really out of whack I use a Serola Belt for anything that is sitting, including riding. It stabilizes the sacrum so the overworked spasming muscles that are trying to support the core can relax.

[PaintPony]

If you are in pain then you need to stop riding.

I tore a groin muscle over a jump when my horse ducked sideways. I grabbed hard with my thigh to keep from falling off and I landed with all my weight in one stirrup.

Then I was stupid and rode in a show that weekend. And I made it a lot worse.
I don’t recommend doing that! It will take time to heal, and you just have to let it. Good luck!

[Mac123]

[QUOTE=Lady Eboshi;8427677]

Labral tears are the suddenly fashionable Dx, as they’ve literally been recently discovered via advanced imaging, but the surgery to “fix” them is HIGHLY questionable, providing dubious results in relation to the natural healing curve.
It’s also now known that a great many people have labral tears that are asymptomatic–even if they found one it might not be what’s causing your pain.[/QUOTE]

Mmmm I don’t agree that the surgery is highly questionable at all. You just have to find a specialist that is experienced with this surgery, which since the surgery hasn’t been around for very long means you need to look hard for a good doc. My surgeon was one of the developers of the arthroscopic surgery to fix labral tears and mine has healed very well.

It is true that many labral tears are asymptomatic but it’s also true that they rarely heal on their own. Most of the time one will have a tear and then a secondary event will tear it further. That secondary event will push the tear into a phase where it’s increasingly painful but seeing as how the labrum is cartilage, it’s not going to just heal up on it’s own without surgical intervention. Sometimes steroid injections will calm down the inflammation and sometimes PRP can help regenerate the area, but a GOOD surgery is the best hope of fixing it.

My initial tear was 5-6 years before the secondary injury that was so acute I couldn’t ride. For those 5-6 years, I just thought it was a reoccurring groin pull. Never went away, but was rarely too painful. Then I really did it in at a clinic, and even though I took 6 months months completely off and then another 6 of limited exercise and riding and extensive PT, and it didn’t help. Sometimes the surgery is the only option if the tear is bad enough.

Babying it along is likely just symptom management, not true healing.

I likely have a tear in the other hip, as many of the things that my hips do that I thought were normal are actually symptoms of labral tears. My operated hip doesn’t do these things anymore. The surgeon said it’s a waiting game with the other hip. It may never progress. But it may, and once it does, it’s a matter of pain tolerance, because it’s not going to magically heal on its own, even with rest and rehab.

[QUOTE=KingoftheRoad;8422953]Welcome to my last year! I had a slight “sore” sensation last September that I attributed to leftover muscle soreness from a show, and I had a show season to finish, so I pushed through it. By November, I was trying to tape my leg/groin muscle up so I wouldn’t cry when jumping.

I tried to rest it through the winter, but could never get it to heal. Finally my trainer grounded me in January, when I couldn’t engage my core muscles to keep my big jumper put together without wincing in pain. I did everything - about 20 sessions of PT using active release techniques, a PRP injection that didn’t hold, even a steroid injection just to try and kill the pain. An ultrasound and MRI did confirm that I had a tear in my adductor muscle. I stopped riding for 6 weeks while doing all of this, but the pain returned when I started riding again.

We were at the point of having to consider adductor release surgery, where they actually separate your groin muscle from your pelvis, when, as a last ditch effort, my sports medicine doctor suggested that we try some Lidocaine patches to allow me to push through some of the minor pain to get the surrounding muscles stronger. At that point, we had been able to confirm that the tear was trying to heal, and that I wasn’t doing any further damage.

So for the next three months or so, I would cut a piece of Lidocaine patch about the size of two postage stamps, slap it right on the area that hurt, tape it down, and then go ride. Miraculously, it worked. By July, I rode without it for the first time, and by September I wasn’t using them at all any more.

Moral of the story? This is the most frustrating injury I’ve ever dealt with - something that started so small that I thought I was just stiff and achy turned into almost a year away from riding competitively. Whatever you do, stop right now and get to a SPORTS MEDICINE doc so you can get properly diagnosed. I agree with getting an ultrasound right away so you know exactly what is happening. Otherwise, you end up losing a lot of time just resting it to see if it gets better, only to figure out that you need more aggressive treatment.

Feel free to PM me if you need more info - Mac123 was great in comiserating with me this year and preventing me from despair![/QUOTE]

So glad to hear things have turned out okay, but what a crazy ride! The lidocaine patch is a brilliant idea, I’ll keep that in my back pocket for the future!!! Glad to hear you’re back in the saddle!