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Do you live with chronic pain? Does pain keep you up at night or affect the way you live during the day? Trigger point injections might be the transformative treatment option you’ve been looking for to keep your chronic pain condition under control.
In this blog, the experienced and compassionate care team at RehabOne Medical Group, with locations in Los Gatos, San Jose, Gilroy, and Salinas, California, discuss what trigger point injections do and how they’re given.
If muscles are irritated, inflamed, or stressed, they can form trigger points, which are areas of tight muscle fibers. The muscles can get irritated or stressed due to injury and repetitive movements as well as from chronic pain conditions, such as fibromyalgia and myofascial pain syndrome.
These trigger points can then irritate the nerves around them, which can cause pain anywhere along the path of the nerves, even in areas far away from the trigger points.
While trigger points may be invisible to the naked eye, you may be able to feel them with your fingers. They may feel like marbles or knots under your skin. The goal of trigger point injection therapy is to loosen these areas and thus relieve the pain.
Trigger point injections usually consist of a saline solution along with a medication. The solution is injected into your trigger points to reduce the inflammation and pain. And with the reduction in inflammation and pain, this may also give the area a chance to heal. We can use trigger point injections to treat muscles in your neck, back, legs, and arms.
Treatments usually only take a few minutes, and you can treat multiple trigger points in the same visit. Along with your injections, your provider may massage the trigger points to help loosen them and enhance the effectiveness of the treatment.
We can even use a dry needle technique to loosen your trigger points if you have allergies to medications. After your treatment, you may notice some bruising, but this should resolve in a few days.
After discussing your symptoms and giving you a thorough evaluation, your provider will discuss trigger point therapy or other options that may be able to help you. To learn more about trigger point injection therapy and to see if it can relieve your chronic pain, book an appointment over the phone with RehabOne Medical Group today.
