Trigger points and Myofascial Pain Syndrome
This is not your standard review of current scientific articles as you are used to find on Anatomy & Physiotherapy. Rather, it is a recommendation for an extensive tutorial on trigger points and myofascial pain syndrome (MPS), which was published online.
Trigger points may be more clinically important than most health professionals realize, and body pain seems to be a growing problem. It is hard to imagine a more rewarding topic for doctors and therapists, with a clear path to helping quite a few people you probably couldn’t help before. Even if you already know about myofascial pain syndrome, you will get new ideas here.
The author Paul Ingraham can be found on Facebook (PainScience) with weekly updates on pain, injuries and (innovative) treatment options. Informative, scientifically sound, funny and comprehensive, this should be on your feed!
“Muscle is an orphan organ. No medical speciality claims it.” Muscle tissue is the largest organ in the body, complex and vulnerable to dysfunction, and the primary target of the wear and tear of daily activities, nevertheless it is the bones, joints, bursae and nerves on which physicians and therapists usually concentrate their attention.
Muscle pain matters: it’s an important problem. Aches and pains are an extremely common medical complaint, and trigger points seem to be a factor in many of them. They are a key factor in headaches (probably including migraine and cluster headaches as well), neck pain and low back pain, and (much) more. What makes trigger points clinically important — and fascinating — is their triple threat. They can:
- cause pain problems,
- complicate pain problems, and
- mimic other pain problems
No professionals of any kind are commonly skilled in the treatment of trigger points. Muscle tissue simply has not gotten the clinical attention it deserves, and so misdiagnosis and wrong treatment is like death and taxes — inevitable! And that is why this tutorial exists: to help patients “save themselves”, and to educate professionals.
This tutorial is not free, but definitely worth its money; the introductory chapters are free.
> From: Ingraham et al., (2016) . All rights reserved to Paul Ingraham. Click here for the Pubmed summary.
