How Trigger Point Injections Can Help You Overcome Your Pain

If you suffer from severe pain and stiffness on a daily basis, you have developed one or more trigger points. These tight spots in your skeletal muscles can create both local pain at the trigger point itself and referred pain radiating outward from the trigger point to other parts of the body. But relief may be just around the corner when your entrust Integrated Healthcare Centers. Our skilled pain management clinic in Garland & San Antonio, TX can use trigger point injections to relax that muscle tissue and help you feel like yourself again.

What are trigger point, and why do they cause so much agony? A trigger point is a knot in a muscle attached to some part of your skeleton. This knot can be tender to the touch and easy to palpate underneath the skin. Trigger points tend to occur in parts of the body related to musculoskeletal alignment and posture, such as the hips, back, shoulders and neck. They may be caused by repetitive stress disorders, poor posture and other issues that make muscle fibers vulnerable to recurring or constant strain.

Trigger points would be bad enough if they only caused pain and irritation in their immediate areas. Unfortunately, they add insult to injury by radiating pain to nearby muscle groups, a phenomenon known as referred pain. This can lead to such varied symptoms as lower back pain, leg stiffness, TMJ pain, tinnitus and headaches. 

Ask Our San Antonio & Garland Pain Management Team About Trigger Point Injections

While it's possible to relieve the underlying causes of your trigger points through chiropractic adjustment, physical therapy and other posture-straightening techniques, the trigger points themselves may require some extra encouragement to undo themselves so you can enjoy immediate, profound pain relief. This where trigger point injections can be extremely useful as a therapeutic treatment. Our pain management team at Integrated Health Centers will start by palpating the trigger point, isolating the know of muscle fiber between two fingers to keep it from moving around. We then inject a local anesthetic such as Lidocaine or Procaine directly into the trigger point. The non-narcotic anesthetic agent numbs and relaxes the muscle tissue, dissipating the knot and putting the referred pain to a stop.

Most individuals suffering from this sort of pain are good candidates for trigger point injections. The main exceptions involve people with uncontrolled bleeding disorders; others will need to make sure they avoid blood-thinning medications for a few days before their treatment. It's worth noting that while you may experience permanent freedom from your trigger point following the injection, you should look into correcting the underlying musculoskeletal alignment or repetitive strain issue that created the trigger point in the first place if you don't want it to recur. 

Pull the trigger on getting the help you need for your muscle pain today. Call 972-686-2701 to talk to our practitioners about trigger point injections!