If you are living with myofascial pain syndrome (MPS), you may be suffering from pain that feels like diffuse aching, sharp stabbing sensations, or cramping. You may be living with symptoms like muscular fatigue, stiffness, and hypersensitivity. This pain can interfere with not only movement but with every other area of your life.
At Specific Care Chiropractic, our Lehigh Acres chiropractors offer trigger point therapies that can alleviate the symptoms of MPS. By applying manual trigger point compression techniques and instrument-assisted tissue release methods, we disrupt knotted muscle tension while improving your spinal alignment. We can restore your flexibility by alleviating the nerve compression that drives referred pain. Call us at 239-369-9109 to start relieving your MPS.
What Is Myofascial Pain Syndrome (MPS)?
According to Mayo Clinic, myofascial pain syndrome (MPS) is muscular pain stemming from a focused point of highly irritated muscle tissue. These myofascial trigger points (MTrPs) form for a variety of reasons, including chronic sustained postures, overloading muscle groups beyond capacity through repetitive motions, or macro-trauma from vehicle collisions.
Once activated, trigger points can cause characteristic pain patterns of tightness and tenderness localized around the scarred knot. They also radiate along the attached muscle in sharp, aching, or burning discomfort. Treatment can relieve these painful, knotted nodules through various modalities.
Chiropractors offer a multimodal, nonsurgical approach to loosen tissues and improve mechanics. Through approved techniques, trigger points can get cleared, relieving MPS flaring across muscle groups. Patients find renewed comfort and stamina for activity possible once more.
Myofascial Pain Syndrome Triggers and Contributing Factors
There are some common factors that provoke the initial formation of trigger point knots within muscular tissue, which drive myofascial pain syndrome flares. Those common factors include:
Muscle Overuse and Strains
Excessive lengthening or repetitive contractions can overwhelm muscle fibers’ resilience, causing micro-tears and scar tissue adhesion buildup. This condition can worsen when the patient receives insufficient rest, which does not allow for full repair.
Poor Posture Habits
Sustained awkward joint angling chronically shortens and stresses certain muscle groups, like rounded shoulders, while other awkward positions over-lengthen the muscles in compensation, like the rhomboids. This imbalance can result in myofascial trigger points.
Psychological Stress and Fatigue
When muscles tense and brace against anxiety for extended periods or in the absence of restorative sleep, metabolic demands rise along with hydrogen ion accumulation, which lowers pH, further irritating your muscles. This fuels trigger points.
Nutritional Deficiencies
Nutritional inadequacies, such as lacking key electrolytes like magnesium and potassium for muscular efficiency or protein for rebuilding strained fibers, can heighten muscle irritability and susceptibility to micro-trauma that is sparked by trigger points.
In essence, anything contributing to sustained muscle tension, microscopic tearing, and inadequate tissue healing perpetuates the regional trigger point formation and related referred pain patterns that characterize MPS.
Common locations for the trigger points responsible for MPS include the shoulders, shoulder blades, neck region, hips, thighs, hamstrings, and lower back musculature based on use and vulnerabilities.
Myofascial Pain Syndrome Symptoms and Effects
Myofascial pain syndrome driven by trigger points wreaks havoc through diverse symptoms, such as the following:
- Localized pain spreading in characteristic patterns: Trigger points radiate sharp or throbbing pain in predictable directions.
- Muscle spasms and stiffness: Nerve excitation makes triggered muscle bands contract into sudden spasms, also inducing guarding stiffness that limits free movement.
- Decreased range of motion: Guarding through contracted trigger point zones reduces joint mobility and flexibility.
- Headaches: Upper trapezius/neck trigger points elicit tension headaches through muscle constriction and nerve irritation.
- Sleep disruption: Pain makes rest uncomfortable, leaving you fatigued.
- Fatigue and low energy: Inflamed muscles work inefficiently, rapidly fatiguing with exertion, while cyclic pain saps stamina. This condition makes completing tasks require greater effort.
In essence, the presence of latent trigger points will eventually hinder all facets of your activities until the affected nerves are properly addressed and anesthetized.
The staff at Specific Care Chiropractic can help you find relief. We can create a treatment plan suited to your needs. Call us at 239-369-9109 to learn how we can help you today.
How Chiropractic Treatment Helps Myofascial Pain Syndrome
Corrective care in Lehigh Acres offers multiple nonsurgical treatment avenues to immediately reduce myofascial pain syndrome and eventually remove underlying trigger points. Those treatments include:
Targeted Deep Tissue Work
Chiropractors perform manual trigger point release techniques, applying direct pressure while lengthening the muscle to disrupt tightened band activity, driving referred pain. This sustained compression clears nerve excitation, which occurs when an irritated nerve fiber transmits amplified pain signals and motor impulses.
Instrument-Assisted Release Methods
Tools like those used in the Graston Technique break up adhesion scar tissue and waste buildup around trigger points, improving local blood flow to wash irritants. Metal tools and devices allow targeted pressure application into tissues at varied angles to facilitate the release of stuck muscle fibers.
Spinal Adjustments
Chiropractic adjustments restore optimal vertebral positioning and neurological flow impacted by neighboring muscle trigger points, like those along the spine. Manipulation directly reduces nerve root inflammation that stimulates muscular trigger points while improving biomechanical alignment that perpetually overloads musculature.
Postural Re-Education
Doctors correct problematic habitual postures like slouching and forward head carriage that perpetually strain muscles prone to trigger points. By coaching patients on proper upright, balanced stance and movement patterns, the repetitive tissue strains sparking trigger point formation are finally resolved.
Rehab Protocols
Stretches, foam rolling, corrective exercises, and lifestyle advice regarding nutrition, stress reduction, and ergonomics reinforce recovery. Therapeutic home routines ensure patients actively participate in their healing process between appointments for quicker, more sustainable trigger point deactivation success.
Rather than just treating localized symptoms, chiropractic care traces pain back to originating trigger points at the muscular level. Comprehensive treatment plans both alleviate MPS flares and curb recurrence.
Learn more about what to expect during your first visit to our Lehigh Acres office, and read our testimonials to learn more about what our clients have to say about us.
Get Chiropractic Treatment for Myofascial Pain Syndrome in Lehigh Acres, FL
If nagging muscular aches around your neck, back, or other areas interfere with your daily life, and self-massage is only providing temporary relief, seek specialized care from our chiropractors treating myofascial pain syndrome in Lehigh Acres, FL. At Specific Care Chiropractic, we dig deeper to relieve radiating trigger point discomfort at the source. Through manual tissue work, instrument-assisted release methods, and adjustments, we normalize your spinal alignment.
Our goal is not merely to minimize your sporadic flare-ups but to progressively deactivate your underlying trigger points. Begin your journey toward sustained comfort and restored energy levels by calling our chiropractic team in Lehigh Acres at 239-369-9109 or contacting us online.
