There are some health conditions that truly earn their name, which is certainly true of trigger points. These knots in your muscles not only trigger local pain, they have a way of setting off pain in other areas of your body.
If you’re experiencing pain and there's no obvious injury, our team of musculoskeletal experts here at Pain Medicine Consultants is focusing on one of the more likely culprits — myofascial pain syndrome and trigger points.
The muscles in your body should make up about 40% of your body weight, which means that you have a lot of these soft tissues. All of your muscles and muscle fibers are surrounded by a membrane tissue called the fascia.
If you’ve ever handled raw meats, such as chicken, beef, or pork, you’ve likely come across the tough white tissues in the meat that are hard to cut. Those are fascia tissues (the term “myo” in myofascial refers to your muscles).
With myofascial pain syndrome, which affects up to 85% of people, the fascia and muscles in a certain area are irritated or damaged, which can lead to local and radiating pain, largely thanks to trigger points.
Trigger points are hyperirritable spots that form in these taut myofascial tissues. Known more commonly as muscle knots, these points can be sensitive to the touch and lead to local pain, as well as patterns of pain that extend through the connective tissues.
In other words, a muscle knot is pulling on the fascia that run through your muscles, which can lead to discomfort in areas that are well away from the originating trigger point.
If we find that your pain stems from trigger points, our frontline defense is trigger point therapy. With this treatment, we go straight to the source of your pain — the hyperirritable muscle knot — and inject the trigger point with a local anesthetic and steroid.
This combination tackles both the pain and the inflammation at the same time and releases the tension inside the trigger point. Once we release the knot, you should feel relief very quickly. Bear in mind, it may take a few days, as your muscles might be sore from the extra tension.
If you don’t want us to inject any medications into your muscles, we can also try dry needling. With this technique, we insert a needle into the trigger point, but we don't inject any medication. Instead, the intrusion causes a sort of distraction that prompts your body to release the knot.
If you’d like to learn more about how trigger point injections can help relieve your muscle pain, please contact one of our offices in Pleasanton, Pleasant Hill, or Corte Madera, California, to schedule an appointment.
