Do you have tight knots of tension in your back, legs or anywhere along your muscles? Those tight knots are known as “trigger points”, and they are nodes of tension that builds up along your muscle tissue. These knots can form during sports, exercise, or even daily activities such as cleaning. Tension can create bunches in your muscles that grow larger over time, leading to chronic pain, inflammation, muscle atrophy and neuropathy. We can find these knots in your back, spine and other muscle tissue and with the right therapies can help you get back to being pain-free!

 

What Are Trigger Points?

Did you know that there are at least 650 different muscles/groups of muscles in your body? Some studies will say that there are as many as 840 individual muscles when the very tiny muscles are counted. All allow you the ability to move. Even the smallest movements—like simply opening and closing your eyes—involves your nervous system sending signals from your brain to your muscles. Those muscles are attached to your bones and joints and whole muscle groups pull in the direction you want to move. This happens instantaneously. Or, it should happen instantaneously unless there is a problem with your muscle.

 

Have you ever found yourself with a knot of tension in your back that’s tender to touch or rub it? And then you notice tightness, pain, swelling or numbness in the area? The problem is likely trigger points. These are tight bands of muscle where the muscle fibers have bunched up under stress, exertion or pressure. There are about 620 different points in the human body that can be trigger points under the right conditions.

 

When movements, exercise, sports training, overexertion or even stress become too much, muscles can bunch up suddenly, creating knot-like lumps. Many patients can even feel these lumps, which are tender and can become swollen. These are trigger points, and even if you don’t remember what caused them, the muscles did have a certain point at which they were triggered to bunch up. These trigger areas can result in decreased blood flow to the area of muscle tissue they are in. This allows scar tissue to infiltrate into your muscles. You’ll begin to feel pain that can become very severe and the trigger point will hinder healing of both the muscle and/or dysfunctional joint.

 

How Can Injections Help?

Some trigger points can become incredibly painful for patients, especially if they have been dealing with trigger points for a long period of time. We can do various methods of trigger point therapy to massage the knots out of your muscles. Deep-tissue treatment may be needed as well, even though the trigger point area may be very painful. That is why injections are sometimes used to help with pain as the medicine promotes healing quicker in your dysfunctional muscle.

 

For trigger points that are at or around painful joints, these injections can be very beneficial. We do large joint injections including knee injections, 3 different shoulder injections and sacro-iliac joint injections. The knee injections utilize Supartz, which in essence is a vitamin injection for the cartilage of the knee. It’s designed to lubricate and decrease pain. If you have other conditions that affect the joint, you can help several conditions at once, as supartz also promotes normal cartilage healing and pain from conditions such as osteoarthritis.

 

For trigger points, you would receive a nerve injection to calm down the nerves in the tissue that are giving you pain. For joint injections, you get the injections in the painful joint. You can feel immediate pain relief with an injection and we try to use the most natural medicines we can to treat the issue. All of our large injections are done under ultrasound guidance. The ultrasound is a safe and effective way to ensure patient safety, as well as make sure that the injection is done in its proper place. It improves the effectiveness of the injection by insuring that the needle and fluid are going exactly where the practitioner wants.

 

Chiropractic Care and Rehabilitative Therapy

Have back pain that isn’t associated with trigger points? Other rehabilitative therapies such as chiropractic care or spinal decompression may be what you need. Chiropractic care is a natural, drugless method of realigning the back and spine to equalize pressure on all of your joints. This helps prevent the breakdown of your joints, gives you greater flexibility and range-of-motion and relieves you of some (or all) of your back pain.

 

There is a therapy that will fit your needs based on if you have trigger points, chronic conditions, injuries, ailments, or simply want help with nutrition and exercise. To see how we can help you with your health, call Spine Correction Center of the Rockies today at (970) 658-5115!