Trigger Point Therapy - Fumbling in the Dark (Part II)

In my quest for effective alternative treatments I often feel like a blind man in a forest searching for the right tree - never knowing when or where I'll find the next tree and always having to investigate to find out if the tree is worthy of consideration.

So it was that I was surfing the web when I came across the website of Dr. Ben King, an acupuncturist and chiropractor in the Toronto area.  One of his posts recommended a book called The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook by Clair Davies for treating myofascial pain.  I usually don't buy books the first time I see them but for some reason I opted to pull the trigger.  Just under 12 bucks and a week or so later, the book arrived to my doorstep.

It sat on a table, unopened for a few weeks while I remained busy with work. One Friday I finally picked it up, began reading, and began fumbling, literally, through the folds of unseen and sometimes hidden muscle.  The book contained diagrams that helped identify muscle groups, the trigger points in each muscle group, and the areas of the body impacted by those trigger points.  While looking at the diagrams, I probed the area searching for the specified muscle.  In some cases, like the bicep, I had no issues identifying the muscle.  However, other muscles, like the scalenes and the psoas, were much more difficult to locate.  When I found a muscle, the next step was to identify any trigger points.  This step was considerably easier than I anticipated.  When pushed, the trigger points caused pain to shoot into the area diagrammed by the book.  In some cases the pain emanated over a foot away from the area I probed.  Pushing on my scalenes (on the side of the neck, attaching to vertebrae and ribs) shot pain to my upper back and down my arm.  Pushing on my pecs shot pain into my shoulder.  Each time I pushed on a trigger point, pain showed up exactly where the book diagrammed.

It took two days to catalog all of my muscles with trigger points - a total that came to over forty.  The next question was what to do about my investigations. 

To read more about my experiments with trigger point therapy, click the following links:

Dr. Travell, the White House Physician of JFK (Part I)
Fumbling in the Dark (Part II)
Oh the Pain (Part III)
Relief (Part IV)