Pain relief is always a priority for our treatment team. Trigger point injections are popular for releasing tension and relieving muscular pain. The following are five essential benefits of this popular therapy.

Convenient Treatment

Our chiropractors have honed their trigger point identification skills so they can quickly find your painful site. They are also adept at injection, so administration is quick and almost painless for most patients.

Trigger point injections are a fast way to get pain relief for your sore neck, arms, legs, and lower back. Since the therapy is at the site of the pain, you won’t need to remove much of any of your clothing. Our chiropractor will gently cleanse the injection site, give you the injection, and dispose of all the materials in an approved biohazard container.

These injections are also very easy to schedule. All you need to do is call our office and ask for an appointment during your lunch hour, afternoon commute home, or any other time that fits into your busy schedule. If you have an upcoming appointment, we’d be glad to add this therapy to it unless you prefer to see us sooner.

Safe Treatment

Our chiropractors do more than locate your trigger points. They determine which solution should be injected into them. A corticosteroid-containing solution is one of the most common medications we use for this therapy.

Corticosteroids are powerful medications that reduce the heat, swelling, and pain of inflammation. This type of medication works by calming your overactive immune system. When immune activity reduces, the flood of white blood cells, fluids, and other immune system responders recedes. As a result, symptoms such as redness, heat, swelling, and pain are greatly diminished.

Many of our patients mistakenly think that their muscles will “beef up” on trigger point medications. This simply isn’t true. Corticosteroids should not be confused with steroids that sometimes get prominent athletes into trouble. Those steroids are similar to the sex hormones such as testosterone.

Corticosteroids are medications manufactured in a lab that are designed to mimic cortisol, a biochemical produced by the adrenal glands. Cortisol is needed for normal immune system functioning. When we inject a trigger point, we encourage a natural healing process at the site of muscle damage.

Some of our patients have expressed concern over using corticosteroids, citing side effects ranging from acne to osteoporosis. While a quick internet search will give you a list of these side effects and more, we use such a small quantity of corticosteroid medication in our trigger point injections that we’re confident our injections won’t give you these types of issues. We always use the minimum amount of corticosteroid or any other medication needed for therapeutic effect.

No Downtime

Since we use so little corticosteroid medication, we’re sure you won’t be sidelined with reduced immune function, diabetes, or any other significant conditions associated with corticosteroid medication. In fact, we’re confident you won’t experience very many of any side effects. In our experience, our patients tend to feel a bit numb near the injection site. As with any injection, the injection site can also feel painful or tender, and you might get a bruise following treatment.

When you come to our practice, we always conduct a thorough interview that includes questions about medication and other allergies. Through many years of practice, we’ve learned that patients can develop new or worsening allergies. Whether this has happened to you or you’ve had allergies for years, please let us know about any allergies before getting trigger point treatment.

If you have allergies, you may be a candidate for dry needling therapy. This treatment provides many of the benefits of a trigger point injection without any medication. We find it’s often a good choice for our patients when trigger point injections aren’t an appropriate option.

Quick Tension Release

One of the most gratifying aspects of administering a trigger point injection for us is the immediate tension relief most patients experience. Muscular tension increases pain and makes movement difficult by stiffening muscles. Whether we inject medication or insert a dry needle directly into a trigger point, it relieves the tension caused by the muscular trigger point.

Tension is often overlooked, but it significantly compounds the pain. When muscles are tense, they are stiff and have difficulty moving. As a result, your muscles don’t get the oxygen and other nutrients needed to maintain and repair themselves. This can quickly become a continual, self-fueling cycle of sedentary behavior and increased pain. Trigger point therapy interrupts this pattern so you can enjoy all of the health benefits of moving your muscles.

Targeted Pain Relief and Beyond

Trigger point injections don’t just reduce painful tension. They direct the healing to your pain. When we inject your muscle with pain-relieving medication, we send the relief directly into the muscle so it can get to work quickly. In addition to reducing muscular tension in minutes, many of our patients report pain relief within a day or two of their session.

Sometimes, patients wonder why we inject into one area when they have pain in another part or parts of their body. This is due to the phenomenon of referred pain. Since the nerves are interconnected, pain in one area can radiate or spread to another part of the body. The good news is that pain relief can follow the same path to provide more extensive relief to other areas affected by pain.

Experience These Benefits and More

As you’ve just learned, trigger point injection therapy is a convenient and safe way to reduce muscular tension, inflammation, and pain with no downtime. If you’d like to learn more about this treatment, we’ll be happy to answer your questions. We’d also love to consult with you to determine if this therapy or another one of our chiropractic treatments suits your situation. Please schedule an appointment at Louisville Medical Center or call us at (970) 344-9551.