WHEN YOUR BODY WON’T LET GO: Stiff-Person Syndrome: The Mystery of a Body That Can’t Relax, the Search for a Diagnosis, and the New Science of Treatment (Neuromuscular Expert Series)

What happens when your own muscles refuse to relax—and no one can explain why?

Stiff-person syndrome can begin with symptoms that seem deceptively ordinary: muscle tightness, painful spasms, stiffness, difficulty walking, an exaggerated response to sudden sounds or movements, or a growing sense that the body is no longer behaving normally.

For some people, the search for an explanation takes years.

WHEN YOUR BODY WON’T LET GO takes readers inside that search.

Written by neuromuscular neurologist Nivedita U. Jerath, MD, MS, this patient-centered guide explores stiff-person syndrome and related disorders through the questions that matter most when symptoms are frightening, testing is complicated, and the diagnosis does not arrive neatly.

Drawing on clinical experience and the realities of diagnostic uncertainty, Dr. Jerath explains how physicians think through stiffness, spasms, pain, abnormal muscle activation, antibodies, EMG findings, autoimmune disease, and conditions that can resemble stiff-person syndrome.

But this is more than a book about tests.

It is about what happens when symptoms are real but difficult to measure. When a laboratory result helps—but does not tell the entire story. When pain changes the way someone moves through the world. And when being listened to carefully can become part of finding the diagnosis.

Inside, readers will explore:

• what stiff-person syndrome is and why it can be difficult to recognize
• the symptoms and patterns that may raise suspicion
• GAD65 and other antibodies—and what positive or negative results can and cannot tell us
• the role and limitations of EMG and other diagnostic testing
• stiff-person spectrum disorders and important diagnostic mimics
• why pain, spasms, stiffness, gait problems, and startle can look different from person to person
• symptomatic and immune-directed treatment approaches
• rehabilitation, mobility, daily function, and living with an unpredictable body
• questions patients and families can bring to medical appointments
• how uncertainty changes when someone finally has a name for what is happening

Throughout the book, Dr. Jerath returns to a principle learned repeatedly in clinical medicine:

A test is a witness. It is not the whole story.

A diagnosis emerges from the relationship between the patient’s history, examination, testing, response to treatment, and the pattern that connects them.

For patients living with stiff-person syndrome, families trying to understand it, and anyone caught in the difficult space between symptoms and answers, WHEN YOUR BODY WON’T LET GO offers a medically grounded and deeply human guide to what we know, what we are still learning, and how to keep looking when the first explanation is not enough.