Trigger Point Therapy:
Learn to relieve pain through your body's Trigger Points

Did you know that your body stores stress in specific spots in your body called trigger points? This stored energy can adversely affect your health and can cause many conditions like headaches, TMJ, and carpal tunnel syndrome.

You can learn how to relieve pressure in these areas, reduce pain, and improve your health through a FREE workshop sponsored by Dr. Richman.

Muscle Pain
80% of us will have muscle pain during our lifetimes, and 20% will have muscle pain for more than 30 days in a gien year. Muscle pain is the most common work-related injury, and the most common cause of chronic pain.

While many muscle injuries recover quickly, many do not, and become chronic. There are several reasons for this:

1) There is no diagnostic test for muscle pain. The cause of muscle pain is a very localozed spasm within a special type of muscle fiber. This spasm does not show up on x-ray, or imaging studies such as MRI. There is no abnormality in the blood and so blood tests show no abnormality either. Thus the diagnosis dependson the description of symptoms and the physical examination.

2) There is no surgery or medication that cures it and most actually aggravate it. There are muscle relaxants such as Soma, Robaxin, and Parafon-forte, but these medications are actually sedatives and provide only temporary relief. There is no surgical technique possible because the trigger points are very small (a few millimeters in length) and there are many of them.

3) Traditional methods of therapy are based on scientifically invalid assumptions. The current main treatment for muscle pain conditions is chiropractic and physical therapy. Traditional chiropractic is based on the incorrect assumption that neck or back pain is caused by malalignment of the spine. Traditional physical therapy is based on the incorrect assumption that musculoskeletal pain conditions are caused by poor conditioning and that the purpose of therapy is to strengthen the muscles.

4) The underlying cause of muscle pain is poorly understood by the medical profession. Although the term trigger points was popularized by John F. Kennedy's White House physician, Janet Travell, MD, she believed that a trigger point was an area of poor blood flow in the muscle. This could never be established and turned out to be incorrect. The first scientific study of trigger points was published in 1993, and much science has emerged since then.

5) Muscle pain is aggravated by muscle tension. Muscle tension is not mental, it is the tendency of the muscle fibers in trigger points to contract in response to sympathetic (alpha-1) excitation.