Urgent Question Regarding Prednisone Burst Dosage

@susiequeue, I'll let other members who have used prednisone weigh in with their experiences and thoughts.

My initial thoughts are to go with your rheumatologist's recommendation. She knows you the most thoroughly. The ER doctor is not as familiar with you.

I know you're upset and that you feel like all your careful and hard work tapering to 5 mg a day will be gone. But your will power and confidence that you can do it is not gone. You can do this.

@susiequeue, I agree with @colleenyoung. Your rheumatologist knows you the best and if it were me I might have a discussion with my rheumatologist and ask some "what if" questions. My rheumatologist was very helpful when I was tapering and provided many suggestions, some I tried and some I didn't. I know it's disappointing after making so much progress on the tapering so one of my what if questions would be how about if I try to see if going to 5 mg provides pain relief before jumping to a higher level. My rheumy always told me to listen to my body and that's kind of what you want to do.

Good luck on whatever you try!

Thanks so much for your helpful reply! My instinct is to take 5 and see what happens, if it's bad I'll go up to 20. I'm looking forward to my appointment with Rheumatologist, I just began seeing her so we're still getting to know each other. Thanks again!

Thanks so much Colleen for your vote of confidence, I really needed your message. I appreciate your insight. So glad I happened to find this forum😊

Keep us informed as to what you do and how it goes.

This isn’t close to your situation of going from 5 to 40 but for a trip in May my rheumatologist let me jump from 2 to 5 for a week and then I went back to 2 with no problem.

@susiequeue Please make an effort to eliminate other possible causes for your back pain. I have seen that doctors want to lay all kinds of pain at the feet of PMR and treat with steroids. I have had shoulder pain for months and finally talked them into doing an MRI. I have known all along that the shoulder pain was very much different than my other pain in level of pain, activities that set it off, etc - just not similar but the doctors did not want to budge.

I finally had the MRI and I have all manner of injuries that will require a shoulder replacement surgery to resolve, NOT more steroids. Apparently it is possible to have a series of minor injuries that lead to more significant injuries, that lead to more, etc. It is an accumulation of these problems that finally set off the pain, not any one problem individually.

If necessary see a back specialist and they can rule out other causes. Remember PMR is a default diagnosis and thus all other causes for a pain need to be eliminated first before PMR is put on the table.

So sorry you have this problem and especially on vacation. Hope things work out well for you.

Thank you for this feedback. I've been having a gut feeling that this may be a back issue, especially since stretching makes it so much better and when PMR hut my shoulders any stretching was so painful. I appreciate your help!

Why go back up to 20mg and not 10 if it gets bad?

Your rheumatologist is right. When I went from 7.5 to 5, pain increased substantially. Can not imagine going from 40 down to 5!