Trigger points, or muscle knots, are sore spots in skeletal muscle tissue that can cause pain and lead to reflective pain in other nearby muscles. To manage these knots, trigger point injections can help.
Muscles are a fibrous, stretchy form of soft tissue that are important for performing functions throughout your body. They are important to most every basic function you perform, including breathing, speaking, swallowing, digesting food, moving, pumping blood, seeing, and hearing. There are three main types of muscles in your body: skeletal muscles that connect to bones and joints, cardiac muscles that line the walls of your heart, and smooth muscles that line your organs.
Trigger points, or muscle knots, are sore spots in skeletal muscle tissue that can cause pain and lead to reflective pain in other nearby muscles. They may also become chronic, causing conditions like myofascial pain syndrome.
If you need relief from myofascial pain or other soft tissue pain and live in the Westminster, Colorado area, Dr. Bret Ellington and our skilled medical team at Inner Balance Acupuncture can help. We offer trigger point injections, a treatment designed to relieve pain in muscle knots. If other methods have not been helpful for you, there are several reasons to try this treatment.
Let’s explore how trigger points cause pain, the reasons trigger point injections may help, and what to expect from the procedure.
These hyperirritable spots in your skeletal muscles are caused by either acute trauma (a direct injury to a specific area of the body) or repetitive microtrauma (a pain caused by repetitive motion in muscle groups). Microtrauma can be caused by things like poor posture for long periods of time, vitamin deficiencies, disturbances in sleep patterns, and joint problems.
Repetitive motions from recreational and occupational activities like holding a phone, prolonged bending over surfaces, sitting in chairs with improper back support, and moving heavy objects can stress specific muscle groups and lead to chronic stress in muscle tissue.
This treatment is designed to offer relief in muscle knots with a combination of substances to numb the affected area, and reduce inflammation and pain. To accomplish this, these injections are done in myofascial trigger points.
Trigger point injections consist of a local anesthetic to numb the injection point, a corticosteroid to reduce inflammation, and a neurotoxin (botulinum toxin A, or Botox®) to relax muscles and prevent nerve signaling pathways.
Trigger point injections can help you in a variety of ways:
These injections can offer immediate pain relief. The combination of a numbing agent and inflammation reduction from the injection can help to reduce pain very quickly, while the neurotoxin works to relax the muscles.
They can restore range of motion. When the pain is bad enough to limit range of motion, these injections can help make moving easier in tissue affected by trigger points.
It can allow other treatments like physical therapy to be more useful. Relieving the pain in trigger points can make rehabilitating those muscles a lot easier, making these treatments more effective in improving movement and function.
It can be effective when other solutions fail. When other methods of dealing with trigger point pain fail to help, such as over-the-counter medications, heat therapy, massage therapy, and myofascial release therapy, these injections can offer a direct and swift solution for relief.
It can be used to treat a variety of conditions. Trigger point injections can be used to help numerous conditions affecting muscle knots, such as myofascial pain syndrome, fibromyalgia, headaches, and migraine.
Muscles play a vital role in movement. While trigger point pain in muscles can be excruciating, trigger point injections can help. If you’re ready to see what this treatment can do for your pain, make an appointment with Dr. Ellington and Inner Balance Acupuncture today.