Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Leg cramps are painful and debilitating. They can stop you in your tracks during a busy day or wake you from a restful sleep.

What is a muscle cramp? It can happen after intense exercise or in the dead of night when you’re doing nothing at all but sleeping. A muscle — say your calf — seizes up without warning, leaving you ...

A recent Ask the Expert column, How Can Leg Cramps Be Treated?, prompted a number of letters from readers about common remedies for leg cramps that were not addressed. In this follow-up column, we ...

The human body is both amazing and terrible. Not only can it do things like heal its own wounds and circulate up to 2,000 gallons of blood per day, but it can also make one foot scrunch up like a ...

Patients often tell Dr. Kiran V. Patel they've been sipping on quinine water to help ease leg cramps. Well-meaning relatives and even some doctors recommend it, said Patel, who's the director of ...

To Readers: A recent discussion of nighttime leg cramps brought an avalanche of readers' remedies, as it always does. I can't submit all for publication, but I'll try to include more throughout the ...

We tried a treatment from your column for nighttime leg cramps. My husband used to get them frequently and would have to walk them off while in pain. He read that taking mustard would alleviate them, ...

Since quinine is no longer recommended for leg cramps, what do you suggest as an alternative? The patient had no success with gabapentin (Neurontin).—PAMELA P. JONES, MSN, FNP-C, Hornell, N.Y. What ...

Quinine treatment now highly regulated Quinine was once available as an OTC remedy used to treat leg cramps and malaria. Concerns over side effects led to its being banned by the FDA. Quinine is a ...

I would like to tell you about a remedy for leg cramps or spasms. One evening we were playing cards with some friends, and suddenly my husband bent over with a severe leg cramp. Our host went to the ...

Have you ever been awakened in the middle of the night because your calf is in a painful cramp? When it happens to me, I have to swing my leg to the floor to stretch the cramp out. After one cramp, ...