Do you have pain or complaints and can’t find a satisfactory answer to your question as to what the cause may be? Do you run from pillar to post?

Often there is a clearly identifiable cause for painful muscles and joints: herniated discs, rheumatism, arthritis (joint inflammation), calcification…

But have you been having pain for some time and no cause has been found? Perhaps myofacial therapy or trigger point therapy can help you.

Trigger points or Myofascial Trigger Points (MTrPs) are muscle knots that are located in the muscles (myo) and the muscle membrane (fascia). Trigger points can occur in any muscle of the body. These muscle knots have the curious property of causing a unique and recognisable pain pattern. The term Trigger point was coined in 1942 by Dr. Janet Travel, who discovered that trigger points can play an important role in both acute and chronic pain.

Pain caused by trigger points is called MPS: Myofascial Pain Syndrome.
Myofascial pain is a common and treatable complaint.

Worldwide scientific research shows that myofascial trigger points play an important role in chronic and acute pain. Trigger points are often linked to various pain complaints such as head, shoulder, neck, back, hip and groin pain, tennis elbow, balance disorders…

“Those clinicians who have become skilled at diagnosing and managing myofascial trigger points frequently see patients who were referred to them by other practitioners as a last resort. These patients commonly arrive with a long list of diagnostic procedures, none of which satisfactorily explained the cause of, or relieved, the patient’s pain.”
Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction, by Janet Travell, David Simons, and Lois Simons, p. 36

“Since no medical specialty claims skeletal muscle as their organ, it is often overlooked.”
David G. Simons, MD, co-author of the Simons, Travell, and Simons Trigger Point Manuals

Commenting on two fascinating 2008 research papers (Chen and Shah), Dr. David Simons wrote, “Currently, consideration of the possibility of a myofascial trigger point component of the pain complaint is commonly not effectively included in the differential diagnosis and therefore is missed cold turkey, which can be very expensive for the healthsystem.”