Soft tissue pain

What is soft tissue pain?  They don’t really address that in massage school do they?  I’m an expert in one aspect of soft tissue pain.  Anyone who has read my threads knows that aspect is trigger point pain.  Contracted muscle cells do to structural damage of the sarcoplasmic recticulum that controls calcium flow within the muscle cells.   And I have developed a system of techniques and hands on procedures that eliminate that kind of pain quickly and easily.  It’s revolutionary in its ability to do so.  It renders all other trigger point therapies obsolete.  You can read about it and watch some of my videos on my Holographic Acupressure thread.  

Although I think trigger point pain is greatly misunderstood, and is indeed the vast majority of the myofascial( soft tissue ) pain on the planet.  There are other types of soft myofascial pain.  One is ligament pain.  There are those( I won’t mention names ) that say the vast majority of soft tissue pain is ligament pain.  And offer techniques to deal with such.  They don’t even mention trigger points in their trainings.  To me, if you have a torn ligament, there is no soft tissue technique that has much practical value.  I could be wrong?  But I don’t think so?  Certainly claims of releasing ligaments is not true, sense it’s not contractile tissue.  

Then there are adhesions.  And there are those that teach that the vast majority of soft tissue pain is because of adhesions.  And hardly ever mention the word trigger point or ligament pain.  Adhesions are different fascial sheaths that get stuck together after an injury during the healing process.  Therapies like our myofascial release, ART, Soft tissue release, pin and stretch, Rolfing , and instrument assisted therapies like Gratston deal with adhesions.  

Like I said, I’m an expert when it comes to trigger point pain.  I’m sort of ok with eliminating adhesion pain, but don’t consider myself an expert at it.  I utilize Soft tissue release and variations there of when it comes to carpal tunnel type injuries with a fair degree of success.   

All that being said, I see more trigger point pain.  But then those are the people that I screen out and work on.    But how do you tell the difference between, trigger point, adhesions, and ligament pain?   And then through in nerve pain on top of everything else.

I know for sure that a lot of professionals don’t know what trigger point pain is.  And they start treating for adhesions ( with some degree of success ), or nerve pain( with no degree of success ).  The adhesion people sometimes accidentally eliminate trigger points with their stripping techniques common in that type of work.  But it’s highly inefficient and ineffective for a number of reasons that I won’t get into now.   

Ok, so how do you tell the difference between those four types o& pain?  For me it’s easy, because of the effectiveness of My Holographic Acupressure techniques.  There is hardly a trigger point that I can’t make go away.  So if the pain doesn’t go away, it ain’t a trigger point.  That leaves ligament pain, or adhesions or nerve pain.  If the pain is in fleshy muscle tissue and it doesn’t go away, it’s probably do to adhesions.  If it’s near a joint, and I can’t release it, it’s probably ligament damage.  I forgot to mention tendon pain.  I can release most tendon pain because it’s more contractile than ligament tissue.  

Diagnostic imaging will validate ligament tears.  Nerve pain is just not palpatible, unless you touch the actual herniated disc itself.  In that case it’s excruciating pain for the patient.  It’s easy to tell from say a Gluteus Minimus trigger point that’s referring extreme  pain down the leg.  

Anyway, everything I’ve said is my opinion based on my experience.   But I think these different types of pain are worth thinking on.  Because we touch those pains every day.  For me....  If it’s trigger point pain/ tendon pain, I can be very effective.  If it’s ligament pain, I may refer them to a Graston physical therapist.  If it’s nerve pain or ligament pain,  well I work with medical doctors. 

The intersting and cool thing about working with these medical doctors is that they will often use me as a diagnostic tool.  They will call me into the room to confirm a diagnosis or to determine how much if any of the pain is soft tissue.  I may say, it’s all trigger points, I can help this person.  In which case they will send them to me, or do trigger point injections.  Or I may say, it’s soft tissue, but I can’t help them( ligament or some nasty scare tissue like myogelosis), or I may say it’s not soft tissue at all.  They go from there.  It’s cool.  

If anyone has any thoughts on what I’ve said, or if they think that anything I’ve said was wrong, please comment.  It’s all good.