A big thank you for all your help. Lois McConnell, retired airline executive, suffered chronic low back and hip pain for a few years. Or consider Jan Campbell. Jan developed a hip pain sometime in early during a period of intense exercising. The pain quickly grew to the point of interfering with walking, and was medically diagnosed as a bursitis, piriformis strain, or arthritis. One trigger point therapy treatment completely relieved a nasty stubborn hip pain that I'd had for five months! Jan Campbell, retired French language teacher, Palm Springs, recovered easily from several months of hip pain.
Every decent trigger point therapist has a pack of treatment successes like this. Not that therapists are great judges of their own efficacy, 54 but where there is this much smoke… Although most such cases involve relatively minor symptoms, this is not to say that they were minor problems. In almost every such case, the pain was relatively mild but extremely frustrating and persistent for many years, then relieved easily by a handful of treatments — an incredible thing, when you think about it.
So much unnecessary suffering! Can a good enough massage therapist remove all trigger points in a session? Or even less. The skill of a therapist is actually only one relatively minor factor among many that affect the success of massage therapy for trigger points — or any therapy, for any pain problem. Even the best therapists can be defeated by a no-win situation and factors beyond their control. For comparison, can a good enough dog trainer train any dog in a hour?
It depends on the situation. It depends, it depends, it depends. There are several common kinds of muscle pain, or pains that can seem like it: arthritis, medication side effects, exercise soreness, muscle tears, and the profound body aching caused by an infection like COVID Thanks to their medical obscurity and the half-baked science, trigger points are often the last thing to be considered.
There are some clues you can look for that will help you to feel more confident that, yes, this kind of muscle pain is the problem instead of something else, maybe something scarier. Almost everyone more or less knows what it feels like to have a muscle knot, so almost everyone has a head start in self-diagnosing trigger points.
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But charts tend to put the focus on the wrong thing, and people need principles way more than they need diagrams. Probably not, but maybe! This is a very short version of my full review. I used to wonder why I even bothered to create this tutorial! Why not just recommend the Workbook? Delving into the nature of the beast — the science — is the strength of this tutorial.
But the Workbook has fallen behind the times on that score. The current edition still promises too much and neglects important new knowledge. This topic is too important for such neglect. This tutorials offers a more realistic and balanced view of trigger point therapy, meets the challenge of difficult cases head on, and hard-nosed reviews of every possible treatment option.
Which is quite a bit less than even a single appointment with someone who claims to do trigger point therapy. Every one of those points is the tip of an iceberg. But this summary should help give you a better sense of whether or not you want to learn more from this source. This is a list of resources relevant to chronic pain in general, but muscle pain in particular.
I avoided publishing this section of the tutorial for many years, because I am generally not impressed by the resources available to both patients and professionals , especially online resources. I remember a slightly testy conversation with someone from an American organization that shall remain nameless :.
Years later that organization still has only a few dozen certified therapists in its directory, and yet it remains one of the few and largest directories of its kind. But certification of trigger point therapists is generally an amateurish and fragmented mess, with many businesses and organizations competing to be the standard.
For inclusion in this section, an organization or business must be defining the field in some way, and they must have a strong online presence. For instance, although professional associations are rarely of much interest to patients, they may provide directories of professionals to help patients find practitioners. NAMTPT provides resources for both patients and professionals, such as a trigger point therapist directory just over therapists and a symptom checker.
The International Myopain Society IMS [PRO] — A nonprofit health professionals organization dedicated to the promotion of information about soft-tissue pain disorders like myofascial pain.
A CPE educates clinical peers, patients, families, and caregivers on ways to relieve pain by the safest means possible. ASPE training is not focused on muscle pain. They provide a directory of members and listings of pain clinics.
The Pressure Positive Company [PRO] [PATIENT] — The best and oldest American manufacturer of good quality massage tools , Pressure Positive has also been a superb corporate citizen, contributing to the advancement of trigger point therapy in many ways, such as collaborating with writers like myself and supporting and promoting scientific research — admirable qualities in a field so often afflicted with pseudoscientific hype.
Their website provides many useful resources for both patients and professionals. David G. Simons co-authored the famous big red texts — the seminal text on myofascial pain syndrome — with Dr. Sometimes this is as easy as stretching. So people can have trigger points for 50 years or more! It is thought that trigger points form due to a lack of energy in that part of the muscle.
This can happen as a result of diminished blood flow, reduced oxygen, or local injury. Since energy is required to make a muscle relax, the lack of energy causes the muscle to get "stuck" in a contraction. The contraction then restricts blood flow, making it even harder for oxygen to get to the area to allow energy production to resume.
Think about when you are sitting at the computer with many muscles in a sustained contraction to hold you still and upright. When you do this repeatedly or for long periods of time, it can create trigger points. What about when you have bad posture? This makes certain muscles have to hold a continuous contraction to keep you upright.
Repetitive motion can also create trigger points because the muscle doesn't have time to rest. Another mechanism for creating trigger points is trauma Since calcium is the trigger for contraction in a muscle, this will create a continuous contraction, and create trigger points. Knowing how they form is important in trigger point treatment as well, because you need to stop creating the trigger points with the posture, repetitive motion, and local trauma. For example, bending at the waist to lift a heavy object is likely to create an exertion overload in the low back muscles.
Trigger point activity resulting from this type of overload is more prominent in unconditioned muscles. People who partake in resistance training lifting weights are likely to develop exertion related trigger points when the just begin training, or return to it after a long hiatus.
Most of the time, this type of overload occurs in a sudden fall, when a person tries to brace against an impact. Overuse or Repetitive Stress Overload: An overload of this type is probably the most common cause of trigger point activity, though this is just my personal estimate. Examples include performing repetitive movements at a job day after day, sporting activities, and gardening. Often the pain associated with overuse injuries is attributed to tendonitis, but I find it remarkable how many cases of tendonitis can be indirectly resolved with trigger point therapy.
Biomechanical Overload: Muscles work together in functional groupings called myotatic units to create bodily movement. For any given movement, the muscles within a myotatic unit can be classified into two groups: synergists and antagonists. Synergistic muscles work together to produce a specific bodily movement, while antagonistic muscles act to produce the opposing bodily movement. Biomechanical overload occurs when one of the muscles in a myotatic unit is weakened by trigger point activity.
In this situation, a synergistic muscle becomes overloaded by the additional work load that it must take on because of its dysfunctional partner, and an antagonistic muscle becomes overloaded by a distortion in the nerve supply controlling it.
Trigger point formation in a muscle due to biomechanical overload occurs frequently in established myofascial pain disorders, and must be recognized to treat these disorders effectively. Postural Overload: One of the more subtle ways of overloading a muscle is to place it in an over-shortened or overstretched state for a prolonged period of time. This type of overload, termed postural overload, can be either of a mechanical or neurological nature, and is closely related to biomechanical overload.
There are two very common types of postural overload that cause trigger points to form within a muscle; antalgic and degenerative. In trigger point therapy, trigger points that develop secondarily to the referred pain from other trigger points are called satellite trigger points.
Usually the trigger point is lighter in color than the surrounding skin. Trigger points require immediate attention and can be treated in several ways. If not addressed in a timely manner, they generate additional trigger points and severe muscle damage which results in limited range of motion, stiffness, injuries, and trauma.
The safest and fastest way to treat them is via massage. There is a specific massage technique that is involved into treating trigger points. We have a perfect service on our menu called Therapeutic massage which includes trigger point work. Another way to treat trigger points is through acupuncture and cupping.
Both of these methods are very effective, as they bring blood flow to the area and reset the muscle so it stops painfully contracting. And the last method is trigger point injection therapy. This is a more invasive and involved procedure and is usually administered by a physical therapy physician. It is used on chronic trigger points that are untreatable through massage or other complimentary therapies. To find out which method is right for you, give us a call or come in for a therapeutic massage session and we will be able to guide you better once we take a good look at them.
What Exactly Are Trigger Points? Types of Myo-fascial Trigger Points Latent vs. Active Trigger Points One type is an active trigger point. Key vs.
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