Yesterday a middle aged woman came into our office complaining of neck and shoulder pain in addition to numbness and pain radiating in her arms. She also had a positive test for thoracic outlet syndrome.
When she stood in her shorts and tank top, I noticed that her bra straps were digging into her shoulders as close to the shoulder joint as they could be without slipping off and the sides were also much too tight and pulled into her armpits so tightly that they could not be budged at all. When her straps were lifted up with much effort, she said the incidental numbness in her arms decreased and she demonstrated full range of motion of the shoulder. She had been fitted at a bra store with a minimizer which was a torture device. When I asked her how she felt when she took off her bra at night, she responded “great”.
After some discussion about the appropriate fitting of a bra, the patient finally understood how the one she was wearing was contributing to how she was feeling. Poorly fitting bras can definitely contribute to pain syndromes or even cause them. If something you put on hurts, take it off. Underwear should not be painful. If you accept the theory that we need to hurt to be beautiful, you could be setting yourself up for a painful journey that may be irreversible.
So the answer is of course that ill fitting clothing can cause pain syndromes as well as other problems. Don’t accept clothing that causes pain even for the short term. It may end up causing a long term problem that won’t go away.
