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Greg Sterling wrote: "A "charlie horse" is nothing more than a muscle cramp and is not associated with the CNS. Give me 100 "charlie horses" to avoid one bout of dystonia!" and in a different posting: "Here's how to tell the difference between the two. If you have trouble brushing your teeth because you can't move your arms, that's rigidity. If your feet are so distorted and your calf muscles are so cramped and you're in excruciating pain to the point you could care less if you even have teeth, that's dystonia." As some one who has suffered from both dystonia and conventional muscle cramps I can vouch for the truth of the first statement. Conventional muscle cramps, painful and disabling as they are, cannot possibly be confused with or compared to a dystonic episode. Quite simply - a cramp is static whilst a dystonic episode is dynamic. By this I mean that a cramp occurs at a given intensity and stays at that intensity until relieved (either by pulling the muscle against the direction of the cramp or by restoring the body's natural salt levels), though once the cramp is relieved there may be some degree of stiffness or soreness. Dystonia on the other hand is extremly active - the intensity of the pull increases throughout the episode and the longer the episode lasts the greater the area of the body it seems to affect. Dystonia cannot be relieved by pulling the muscles in the opposite direction - in fact good luck trying - when my dystonia really gets going there is no possibility of pulling the muscles in any direction other than the one they're going. (Note: Cramps tend to affect one muscle at a time whilst dystonia affects groups of muscles). I have found that mild dystonia can be relieved by activity (e.g. walking, swimming etc) but higher levels preclude that by their very nature and only dear old levodopa does the trick. As regards telling the difference between dystonia and rigidity I would suggest that the two are easily confused when speaking of mild dystonia, however no one should have any trouble distinguishing between the two by the time dystonia has reached the intensity Greg describes above (I certainly don't). But at the risk of opening a brand new can of worms I think it rather ignores the role of bradykinesia to attribute the inability to brush one's teeth entirely to rigidity. However, I do concede that bradykinesia and rigidity tend to combine forces to produce a great many of our symptoms, so maybe I'm just being finicky. Dennis