How You Can Benefit From Trigger Point Injections

Perhaps you spend hours in a chair in front of a computer screen, straining your neck and shoulders, or your lower back develops a muscle spasm. In either case, a very specific area in your muscle or fascia is so tense that it creates a dull ache that radiates outward, placing tension on surrounding tissues. 

If this sounds like something you struggle with, the good news is that you may be one trigger joint injection away from relief.

At Pain Medicine Consultants, our team of highly trained pain medicine specialists understands the many conditions that can cause musculoskeletal pain, and muscle tension certainly qualifies. To remedy your pain, we often turn to trigger point injections, which is a technique we use to release the tension right at its source.

Here’s a look at how trigger point injections can benefit you.

A matter of tension

To better understand how trigger point injections can relieve your muscle pain and tension, let’s take a look at how the problem develops in the first place. 

When you strain a certain area of your muscles or fascia (the tissue that surrounds your muscles), your muscles respond by forming a tight knot. While this reaction is largely to protect your muscles against damage, the tension can create myofascial pain in the area of the knot, as well as outlying areas that are connected to the affected tissue.

The problem with these types of muscle knots is that once your tissue tenses, it has a hard time relaxing again. And the added tension in this small area of muscle can pull on surrounding tissues, widening your zone of discomfort and exacerbating the problem.

Our goal, in these cases, is to get to the source of the tension and relieve it, allowing critical healing resources to flow freely again. And one of the best ways to accomplish just that is through our trigger point injections.

Pulling the trigger

When you come in, we first review your symptoms and perform a physical exam to locate the origin of your myofascial pain — your trigger point, as it were. Often, we can feel the muscle knot just by palpating your tissue, though some knots may be buried more deeply in your tissue.

Once we’ve identified the source of your tension, we prepare you for a trigger point injection by applying a local anesthetic on the surface of your skin. Once your skin is sufficiently numbed, we inject a solution directly into your muscle knot, which usually contains a local anesthetic and a steroid to combat the inflammation.

If necessary, we may administer several injections into the site, but whether we use one or three injections, the in-office procedure takes us only minutes to complete. Once we’re finished, you’re free to get on with your day, and you should feel better almost immediately.

Head-to-toe relief

While we’ve been discussing the most common culprits when it comes to myofascial pain, such as lower back strain and tech neck, we turn to trigger point injections to address other issues, as well, including:

• Tension headaches
• Fibromyalgia
• Arm or leg pain
• Temporomandibular joint (TMJ) pain

Myofascial pain can develop most anywhere in your body and for any number of reasons, and trigger joint injections can play a role in remedying most all of them. 

If you want relief from your muscle tension, contact one of our locations in Pleasant Hill, Pleasanton, or Madera, California, to set up your trigger point injection treatment.