"Pain & Trigger Point Therapy"

Self Treatment for Pain

I'm a believer in the process of elimination, with pain, trigger points are a good place to start. Start reading about trigger point therapy here. Start treating yourself - it's free. If you want to buy the book - visit the book store on this site. Tell me what you find as you work through it. Put it in the forum for others. You might check out the Holistic portion of the Directory or the Pdf Library. Lots of health links and resources there. Watch a short video on trigger point treatment and you can open the entire book by double clicking the image below...

Referred Pain

This is real and it works. Anything that can enhance our health and our happiness is worth practicing. All things in this dimension have cause. Pain has cause and that is what we should look for if we want to stop it. All things are holistic. All systems are holistic. The number one killer of people in the world is stress. Stress causes war, strife, greed and takes our attention from the road when we're on the freeway. In turn these things cause more stress. You can see how stress has a snowball effect. The body does not perform growth function and defense function at the same time. At least not very well. Stress causes all pain. It may not be evident but at the root of all pain and discomfort is stress. Tension comes from stress and effects the muscleskeletal system very quickly. This causes immediate discomfort. Let it go long enough and it can lead to serious pain. If it is not understood and seen to it can become a chronic illness.

Ankle pain caused by a trigger point in the peroneus longus muscle. It's a mistake to assume that the problem is at the place that hurts.

The pain shown here feels like a sprained ankle. In the worst case, this pain can be from a torn ligament or broken bone. Much of the time, however, a 'sprained' ankle is nothing more serious than referred pain from myofascial trigger points (small contraction knots) in the peroneus muscles on the outer side of the lower leg.

When you twist your ankle, the peroneus muscles are overloaded and overstretched, and trigger points quickly develop. Pain from trigger points can be just as intense and disabling as pain from any other cause, and they can occur in any muscle in the body.

Self-treatment of peroneus trigger points, Trigger points in the peroneus muscles can be treated with self-applied massage, stroking them as shown here with a 20 inch piece of 3/4 inch PVC pipe.

You can also use a Tiger Tail, a Thera Cane, your fingers, your knuckles, or even the heel of your other foot.

Trigger point massage can get rid of your pain in two or three days with three treatments per day. If trigger points are the problem, you'll get a discernible degree of immediate relief.

Aches and Pains

Just like in the above example, an amazing number of our common aches and pains "and a variety of other puzzling physical symptoms" have been found to be caused by myofascial trigger points. In fact, trigger points have been proven to be the primary cause of pain roughly 75 percent of the time and to be part of nearly every pain problem.

This is based on decades of medical research by Doctors Janet Travell and David Simons, authors of the highly-respected, two-volume medical textbook, Myofascial Pain & Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual.

The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook is founded on Travell and Simons's research, but it's Travell and Simons made easy. Sixteen-hundred pages of difficult medical language have been reduced to a concise, easy-to-read 323 pages, while retaining all the essentials of trigger point science.

With the aid of 376 illustrations, you're shown in detail how to find and self-treat trigger points in 120 pairs of muscles throughout the body. Nine medical doctors have approved and endorsed The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook, and Dr. David Simons himself wrote the Foreword.

You may have the wrong idea about your pain - and so may your doctor!

You may think it's a little nutty to believe that tiny little knots in your muscles could be responsible for so many kinds of trouble. But these are medically proven facts. Consider that your muscles make up as much as 50% of your body weight. You have muscles everywhere, covering nearly every other tissue or structure in the body.

Symptoms that appear to be generated by a joint, an internal or external organ, or an eye, ear, or tooth can in reality be an effect caused by trigger points in nearby muscles, or even a muscle some distance away. Here are a few examples:

The pain from a trigger point in a chest muscle can make you feel you're having a heart attack. Referral from a trigger point in a neck muscle can make an eyelid droop or twitch.

Nerve compression by a muscle that is being kept in a state of constant tension by trigger points can cause numbness in a hand or foot. Joint pain sent from trigger points in nearby muscles can feel like arthritis. A toothache can be nothing but referred pain from a jaw muscle.

      Can the solution be something so commonplace as massage?

What do you do when a muscle hurts or feels tight? You rub it, of course! It's nature's cure. And rubbing is exactly what works with a trigger point provided that you rub in the right place. Remember that pain and other symptoms from trigger points are usually displaced.

In treating the ankle pain in the example at the top of the page, it would do very little good to rub the ankle itself. You have to know that the real source of the pain is a knot in a muscle halfway up the side of the leg. Intuition or commonsense won't help you find these knots. You need some guidance.

The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook will help you find your trigger points and show you how to self-treat them in the most effective and efficient way. If conventional medical treatment or physical therapy aren't giving you the relief you need, your salvation may lie in self-applied trigger point massage.

The price of the book is a bargain, considering the enormous amount of information it contains, and the risks of the therapy are almost nonexistent. If you're ready to take your well-being into your own hands, you may be in for a very pleasant surprise.

Trigger Points and Referred Pain

      a Quick Technical Overview

According to Doctors Janet Travell and David Simons in their widely acclaimed medical textbook, Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual, myofascial trigger points are tiny contraction knots that develop in a muscle when it is injured or overworked.

The Physiology of a Trigger Point

The part of a muscle fiber that actually does the contracting is a microscopic unit called a sarcomere. Contraction occurs in a sarcomere when its two parts come together and interlock like fingers.

Millions of sarcomeres have to contract in your muscles to make even the smallest movement. A trigger point exists when over stimulated sarcomeres are chemically prevented from releasing from their interlocked state.

      A Microscopic View
   illustration of contracted sarcomeres in a myofascial trigger point



The drawing is a representation of several muscle fibers within a trigger point. It's based on a microscopic photograph of an actual trigger point.

This particular trigger point would cause a headache over your left eye and sometimes at the very top of your head.

Letter A is a muscle fiber in a normal resting state, neither stretched nor contracted. The distance between the short cross ways lines (Z bands) within the fiber defines the length of the individual sarcomeres. The sarcomeres run lengthwise in the fiber, perpendicular to the Z bands.

Letter B is a knot in a muscle fiber consisting of a mass of sarcomeres in the state of maximum continuous contraction that characterizes a trigger point. The bulbous appearance of the contraction knot indicates how that segment of the muscle fiber has drawn up and become shorter and wider. The Z bands have been drawn much closer together.

Letter C is the part of the muscle fiber that extends from the contraction knot to the muscle's attachment (to the breastbone in this case). Note the greater distance between the Z bands, which displays how the muscle fiber is being stretched by tension within the contraction knot. These overstretched segments of muscle fiber are what cause shortness and tightness in a muscle.

Normally, when a muscle is working, its sarcomeres act like tiny pumps, contracting and relaxing to circulate blood through the capillaries that supply their metabolic needs. When sarcomeres in a trigger point hold their contraction, blood flow essentially stops in the immediate area.

The resulting oxygen starvation and accumulation of the waste products of metabolism irritates the trigger point. The trigger point responds to this emergency by sending out pain signals.

Referred Pain

The defining symptom of a trigger point is referred pain; that is, trigger points usually send their pain to some other site. This is an extremely misleading phenomenon and is the reason conventional treatments for pain so often fail. It's a mistake to assume that the problem is at the place that hurts!

Travell and Simon's research has shown that trigger points are the primary cause of pain 75% of the time and are at least a part of nearly every pain problem.

Trigger points cause headaches, neck and jaw pain, low back pain, tennis elbow, and carpal tunnel syndrome. They are the source of the pain in such joints as the shoulder, wrist, hip, knee, and ankle that is so often mistaken for arthritis, tendinitis, bursitis, or ligament injury.

Trigger points also cause symptoms as diverse as dizziness, earaches, sinusitis, nausea, heartburn, false heart pain, heart arrhythmia, genital pain, and numbness in the hands and feet. Even fibromyalgia may have its beginnings with myofascial trigger points.

Self-Treatment

Luckily, the pain and other symptoms caused by trigger points occur in predictable patterns. When you know where to look, trigger points are easily located and deactivated with simple techniques of self-applied massage.

Massage of the trigger point flushes the tissue and helps the trigger point's contracted sarcomeres begin to release. In dealing directly with the trigger point, massage is the safest, most natural, and most effective form of pain therapy.

With trigger point massage, myofascial pain can usually be eliminated within three to ten days. Even long-standing chronic conditions can be significantly improved in as little as six weeks.


In The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook, nationally certified massage therapist Clair Davies simplifies Travell and Simon's extensive research into myofascial pain and makes it accessible to the layman. His innovative methods of self-applied trigger point massage will get rid of aching pain, numbness, tingling, burning, and other myofascial symptoms if trigger points are the cause. Read the Trigger Point Therapy Workbook at Trigger Point Therapy Workbook at Google Books