Did you know?? Sciatica usually doesn't involve the spine
As long as a spinal injury has been ruled out, you are not experiencing nerve pain. You are feeling muscle referral pain. To fully address this, it’s essential to release all the gluteal muscles, adductors, quads, and especially the quadratus lumborum, which can contribute to pain signals in the glutes.
Myth #1
Pain is the result of injury or some mysterious “inflammation”.
Nope. Although acute trauma, like a fall or collision, can damage tissues and cause pain, most pain is actually from trigger points in muscles. This has been proven by studies at pain clinics, research at the NIH and in our own clinical experience. Trigger points are small areas of stagnation in muscle tissue that develop in response to chronic or acute stresses on muscles. Trigger points aren’t injuries, and they commonly send pain to other areas (pain referral) in a way that can very much feel like an injury. This fools everyone - doctors, PTs, most practitioners.
Myth #2
Painful, impaired muscles test "weak" and need to be strengthened.
Nope. You can’t “strengthen” yourself out of pain. That’s why traditional physical therapy often fails or even makes pain worse. There is a common misunderstanding of how and why a muscle becomes “weak”. Weakness is often the result of trigger points in muscle fibers. These fibers cannot contract on demand of the nervous system -- they are in a stuck contraction known as a contracture. Putting compromised muscles with trigger points under load, stretch or shortening often leads to a larger pain response from the nervous system, and more trigger point fiber development, exacerbating the problem. In our Therapeutic Session, the trigger point fibers are first reduced, and pain-free movement restored, before any strengthening work. Restoring the ability of muscle fibers to contract on demand brings them back “online” to the nervous system. The muscle regains strength immediately and then can be further conditioned with incremental strengthening exercises.
Myth #3
Pain means muscles are tight and need to be stretched.
Nope. Although stretching can feel great after being immobile in front of computer or driving for too long, it can also light up pain issues. And for chronic, recurring pain, stretching is borderline useless, unless you understand where the pain is coming from in the first place (and it's usually not where you might think).
The issue comes down again to most medical and massage professionals not understanding muscle trigger point physiology. When trigger point fibers are stretched without first being treated, the nociceptors in the muscle will send danger signals to the nervous system which will then engage the muscle and shut down the stretch to protect the body from perceived danger.
At Therapy Point Massage, we use knowledge of pain referral and functional relationships to understand the true sources of pain. We then use muscle energy techniques and neurological distraction to resolve trigger points in muscles to gain strength, length and pain-free range of motion.
The result is a fast, dramatic change--sometimes within minutes.