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Back Pain Trigger Points
What are Back Pain Trigger Points?Trigger points describe areas involving muscular knots or pent up tension. Most are attributed to some form of injury and this can truly be the case for some patients. However, many instances of muscular tension are not sourced by structural damage or degenerative process, but instead by internal stress. This is called psychological back pain and is the single most prevalent reason for chronic symptoms to exist.Trigger points may be painful when manipulated or may provide instant relief. Many care providers massage these points vigorously, eliciting agonizing pain, which the poor patient simply has to “work through” or “breathe through” until the region feels better. Most of the time, this type of massage is unnecessary and completely useless, but still, these same care providers insist that these “knots” must be broken up in order for the pain to end… Back Pain Trigger Points InformationThere is quite a bit of hype about trigger point manipulation. There are care practitioners who specialize in this practice and even a variety of devices used for professional and self treatment of trigger point concerns. Trigger points have become big business in the back pain industry.In my experience, there is little or no validity in the trigger point theory. Sure, the massage can help break up knots and provide temporary relief (at a cost of muscular pain and soreness quite often…) However, the actual underlying source of most trigger point issues is ischemia, which will not respond to manipulation and will always come back, time after time, regardless of how many manipulation sessions you endure. In other cases, the therapy resolves the painful points in one area and creates new ones somewhere else. Sound familiar? Yeah, I bet it does… Trigger point therapy is almost always symptomatic treatment, no different from any other type of bodywork. Back Pain Trigger Points AdviceI do not recommend patients become involved in trigger point theory or treatment. Most of the time, this will substitute for any of the other symptomatic manipulation modalities, such as massage or chiropractic. These methods are known to continue long term and provide no hope for a real and lasting cure. Why bother? Why waste your time and money? Instead, I highly recommend spending some quality time researching your diagnosed condition and looking for holes in the causative theory. This is far more useful, since most back pain concerns are misdiagnosed and this is precisely why you can never find a true cure for the problem. For practitioners who use trigger point treatment, I have no criticism. I simply recommend informing the patients that the sessions are unlikely to resolve a painful complaint, since statistically, most will return in the same location or a new location time after time again…On a positive note, I would recommend trigger point therapy, or any type of bodywork, over drugs 100% of the time... Back Pain Trigger Points to Back Pain Home 1/11/10
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