Scientific Living » Trigger Points

Prolotherapy Cures Chronic Pain- Part 3 of 5

Scientific Living — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:05:53 +0000

Unfortunately, very few health care professionals are properly trained to diagnose the true causes of chronic pain. This results in many garbage can diagnoses. The true cause of the vast majority of chronic pain is tendon and ligament laxity.

Garbage Can Diagnoses

You may have heard of the term before. Basically, it means a doctor is labeling you with a name that describes your symptoms, but doesn’t explain the cause. If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with something defined by a set of signs and symptoms, but not a root cause, then I strongly encourage you to be skeptical. If all that is known are symptoms, then you are guaranteed never to fully recover.

The Right Type of Patient

Which patient stereotype more closely sounds like you? :

One type immediately believes what the doctor tells them, and can very often end up taking pain medications, going to support groups, suffering, or learning to deal with their symptoms (or worse yet, their “psychosomaticism”) for the rest of their lives.

Another type of patient would rather spend their whole lives looking, yet failing to find a solution, rather than NOT spending their whole lives failing to find a solution. As the saying goes:

“It is better to burn out, than to rust out.”

The wonderful truth is that many of these proactive types of patients do actually rid themselves of their ailments.

Trigger Points

Trigger points are very often involved in chronic pain. A trigger point is nothing but a very small muscle knot. Sometimes it can feel like a big lump under your skin, but it is almost always the size of a tiny pea. They are typically so small, that even after you manage to find one by feeling around with your hands, if you wanted to stick it with an acupuncture needle, you would probably miss many times before you successfully touched it.

Referred Pain

The reason we care about trigger points is that they cause pain. If you have chronic pain, feel deep inside the bands of muscle and try to locate a trigger point. You probably can. It will feel like a little nodule. If will often feel tender. The big tip-off that you have found a trigger point is that when you press down on it, you will experience pain somewhere else. This is called referred pain, and makes a very important point:

The place where you hurt is often not the place where the problem is!

Trigger Point Therapy

Removing trigger points will not necessarily make you pain free forever, as trigger points can reappear. Trigger points themselves have a root cause that must be removed.

Causes of Trigger Points

There are several speculations as to the cause of trigger points. These include things like neurological malfunctions and poor oxygenation. The most relevant cause is injury to tendons and ligaments. Tendons and ligaments can often not heal properly due to poor blood circulation in those areas. Muscles, on the other hand, get lots of blood circulation, and over time pretty much always heal completely.

When ligaments get injured, they become “lax”, which means loose. Ligament laxity results in unstable joints. If the ligaments are too loose, they aren’t doing their job of supporting the joint properly. In order to “pick up the slack”, trigger points may form. Trigger points gobble up some muscle into a knot, shrinking the length of the muscle, thereby compensating for the laxity.

Ligament Laxity

The amazing fact about ligament laxity is that it also causes referred pain. Regardless of whether or not trigger points form, the lax ligaments can cause referred pain by themselves. In the 1950’s Dr. George Hackett, the father of modern prolotherapy, diagrammed pain referral patterns caused by ligament laxity throughout the body. At the same time, Dr. Janet Travell, the Presidential physician, was diagramming pain referral patterns due to trigger points. Guess what! The patterns highly correlated!

And guess what treatment effectively removes ligament laxity? Yes, it’s prolotherapy. The experience of prolotherapists is that they can reliably predict what ligaments are causing pain, based on known referral patterns. Then, by treating those ligaments, the patient gets permanent alleviation of pain.

Statistics on Prolotherapy

Here are some statistics from Dr. Gustav Hemwall, an important advocate of prolotherapy in the 1900’s:

“In 1974, Dr. Hemwall presented his largest survey of 2,007 Prolotherapy patients to the Prolotherapy Association. The survey related the following:

1,871 patients completed treatment
6,000 treatments were administered
1,399 (75.5 percent) patients reported recovery and cure
413 (24.3 percent) reported general improvement
25 (0.2 percent) patients showed no improvements
170 patients were lost to follow up.

More than 99 percent of the patients who completed treatment with Prolotherapy found relief from their chronic pain. These results are similar to those published by Dr. Hackett, showing that Prolotherapy is completely curative in many cases (75 to 90 percent) and provides some pain relief in nearly all patients treated.”

These statistics amaze me! I hope they amaze you too. In fact, there are prolotherapists practicing today that are even more effective, due to more advances in the technique and other supporting therapies.

Pinched Nerves

Many people realize intuitively that their pain is referred, and attribute it to a pinched nerve. This is often a mistake. According to prolotherapists, pinched nerves are actually very rare when compared to ligament laxity. The way to tell the difference is that a pinched nerve pretty much always causes pain on a level of at least 8 out of 10 if you move the wrong way. According to prolotherapists, ligament and tendon pain tends to be more of a 5 out of 10. This is more of a continuous, dull, or vague ache.

Recap of Chronic Pain Causes

Ligament laxity is by far the number one cause of chronic pain. This is unfortunately a little known fact. Prolotherapy is an effective method of solving ligament laxity. The proof that prolotherapy is effective is clinical results. Official research, such as the double blind, placebo controlled study, is not abundant. However, research is growing, and I will share sources with you later in this series. There are also a number of systematic reasons why research in the area of prolotherapy will always be difficult. I will discuss this later in this series.

So what is the actual technique of prolotherapy?

Disclaimer: This article is not medical advice. This is opinion and is for informational purposes only. If seeking medical advice, consult a licensed physician.

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Chronic Pain Cured Naturally with Prolotherapy

Scientific Living — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 02:20:47 +0000

Prolotherapy is a natural injection treatment given in the doctor’s office that has demonstrated potential to cure 100 percent of chronic pain in an appropriate candidate when given by an adequately skilled physician. (1)

In 400 B.C. Hippocrates would lance the injuries of athletes with hot pins. Strangely enough, he claimed that this treatment worked to heal their injuries. He was perhaps the very first prolotherapist.

Prolotherapists attest that the root cause of most chronic pain is unhealed damage to tendons and ligaments. Tendons are what connect muscle to bone, and ligaments are what connect bone to bone. Unlike muscles, tendons and ligaments don’t heal well because they do not get much blood flow to them. When a person has an injury, the body causes inflammation around the site. This inflammation triggers a series of processes in a “healing cascade” that brings blood to the area and heals the injury in a number of ways. When the inflammation disappears, the body has finished its accelerated efforts at healing. If tendons and ligaments are not completely healed by this time, then chronic pain can set in.

A prolotherapist is trained in locating damaged tendons and ligaments throughout the body by physical examination. Then he or she will inject damaged tendons and ligaments in the needed area(s) with an “irritant” solution. This solution intentionally causes local inflammation just at the site of the injury, signaling the body to kick start a new healing cascade, as if the site has been freshly injured. Typical components of the solution are dextrose, zinc, and sodium morrhuate. A typical treatment may involve anywhere from 10 to over 100 injections. The treatment is typically given 4 to 6 times, each spaced 1 month apart. Soreness for a few days is expected after each treatment. If all the sites of injury were injected with enough solution, then this is usually all that is required for complete resolution of pain.

In addition to healing connective tissue, prolotherapy also can regenerate joints, cartilage, and meniscus injuries.

While receiving prolotherapy, anti-inflammatory medications like ibuprofen are not allowed, since they would interfere with the inflammation that prolotherapy intentionally creates. These insights from prolotherapy also debunk the popular myth or doing R.I.C.E. (rest, ice, compress, elevate) for an injury. Doing any of these would only decrease blood flow and inflammation, which is a recipe for helping an injury become chronic.

Integrative physicians who practice prolotherapy list other factors that may need to be addressed for chronic pain to resolve. These include lifestyle, sleep quality, diet, food and environmental allergies, chronic infections, toxins, and hormonal imbalances. Adjuncts to prolotherapy can be used to increase responsiveness if necessary. These include the addition of “platelet rich plasma” or various growth factors to the injections. Another popular modification is called “prolozone” (injecting ozone gas into the injury).

Modern prolotherapy has been practiced for decades and is one of those rare alternative therapies that is slowly gaining mainstream acceptance. The number of skilled doctors is still relatively limited. The most qualified physicians are usually the ones that do prolotherapy full time. You can google for prolotherapy videos to get an idea about the skill needed to give an effective treatment.

Prolotherapy costs on the order of $500 to treat one area. A course of treatment might then cost about $3000. Considering that chronic pain costs the American public $100 billion dollars a year (and only “manages” pain), and that 50 million Americans are living with chronic pain, this is a cost effective solution.

For an in-depth look at prolotherapy, read this 5 part series:

The Current State of Pain Management
Understanding “Good”and “Bad” Inflammation
The Causes of Chronic Pain
The Technique of Prolotherapy
Researching Prolotherapy

More info:
(1), 2, 3, 4, 5

Disclaimer: This article does not contain any medical advice. This website contains opinion and is for informational purposes only. If seeking medical advice, consult a licensed physician.

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