Muscle Twitching Help: Community of People with Twitching Muscles

Muscle twitching may not be a big deal to you, but for many men and women, twitching muscles cause tremendous anxiety and stress. Just one muscle twitch can set off a fear of dying, but only if the person knows that twitching muscles is a symptom of a fatal disease. With any muscle twitching incident, the person fears the worst.

Imagine living in this kind of fear. Muscle twitching brings you to tears. A twitching calf muscle, a twitching shoulder muscle, quadriceps muscle, foot muscle...the muscle twitching may be sporadic or nonstop. Muscle twitching may be all over the body, or just in one hot spot. Twitches may make clothes jump.

So what is it about muscle twitching? Don't we all experience an occasional twitching muscle, especially after weight lifting workouts or intense aerobic exercise? Anxiety about anything can also make muscles twitch. We all experience this.

The problem begins when a man or woman starts getting annoyed at the twitching muscles, and invariably does an Internet search on "twitching muscles." Googling these keywords takes the unsuspecting person to various links about an incurable disease that kills every one of its patients: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The person now thinks he or she has ALS, because muscle twitching is a symptom of ALS.

Fear, fear, fear plays tricks on the mind.

The fear is so overwhelming that these people become obsessed, relentlessly giving themselves muscle strength tests by doing oddball things like trying to get up out of a deep chair on one leg; hopping on one leg; repeatedly lifting something overhead; spending hours studying the suspected area of muscle atrophy in the mirror to see if it looks like the muscle is wasting away; becoming fixated on what appear to be "dents" in the muscle (a sign of atrophy?); studying the way other people walk to see if THEY, too, tend to drag a foot occasionally (sign of the classic ALS foot drop?), and...

Careful, don't examine your tongue in the mirror.