| I had a very similar experience. Not too long after I started playing, I got repetetive stress pain in both wrists .... it was probably from so much time working at a computer in the daytime and so much time practicing (with a lot of effort and not much technique) at night.
A hand doctor put me in splints and gave me anti-inflamatories that could have been prescribed for a race horse. After a month there was zero improvement.
Then at a party a friend of mine who's an excellent acupuncturist asked to take a look. She gave me real working over ... pushing and pulling and digging her elbows in. She said the the same thing as the hand doctor ... that a particular nerve was irritated. But she was able to say why. Aparently my wrist joints had been weakened from overuse, so the muscles above and below the elbows were tensing up to try to provide support. This tension was irritating the nerve. When she hit trigger points on my triceps and forearms, i felt shooting pains all the way down to my fingers.
She didn't fix me ... she just said, "you can feel where those points are, right? just work on those. It will loosen the muscle tension."
The next day I dug into those pressure points until the shooting pains went away. I was able to play bass no problem for the first time in over a month. Sometimes the pain would come back. But when it did, I just used it as a reminder to relax, and it would go away. sometimes I'd have to work the trigger points a bit, but eventually not at all.
It was great, because she showed me how to heal myself. And the result was the pain became useful ... just a reminder that I was playing with too much tension.
__________________
My kung fu is the second best.
| 
