4 Great Benefits of Trigger Point Injections

There’s a song many of us learned as kids about how things in the human body are connected: “The thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone …” Well, this connectivity is made abundantly clear when you have a trigger point, which can cause local pain as well as referred pain.

About 85% of people will develop at least one trigger point in their lives, and many people deal with recurrent myofascial pain due to these knots of tension.

The good news is that the team here at Neuropathy & Pain Centers of Texas offers targeted trigger point injections that can relax tense trigger points to relieve your pain. Below, we dive into 4 ways that this approach to myofascial pain and trigger points is a go-to treatment for many of our patients.

1. Trigger point injections get to the root of your pain

A trigger point is a hyperirritable spot that’s located in a taut band of muscle. This ball of tension can create localized pain, but it can also lead to referred pain because it tugs on your myofascia, connective tissues that run through your muscles.

As a result, a trigger point in one area, such as your shoulder, might lead to pain in another area, such as your upper back and neck.

With trigger point injections, we locate the trigger point responsible for the pain, then insert a needle into the area to break the pain-tension cycle.

2. Trigger point injections can offer quick pain relief

There are several types of trigger point therapy. The differences lie in what, if anything, we place inside the needle. In some cases, we might load the needle with a local anesthetic and a steroid to combat pain and inflammation in the trigger point.

Sometimes, we don’t put anything in the needle — a technique called dry needling — and the insertion of the needle into the trigger point is enough to release the tension.

In either case, patients are often able to achieve fast relief from their myofascial pain.

3. Trigger point injections work almost anywhere

Another great benefit of trigger point injections is that they work all over your body to address a wide range of conditions, including:

Tension headaches
Neck pain
Back pain
Knee pain
Temporomandibular joint pain
Fibromyalgia
Hip pain

Anywhere there’s an accessible trigger point, we can target the myofascial tension through trigger point therapy.

4. Trigger point injections reduce the need for pain medications

Trigger point injections are a great way to reduce the need for pain medications. Given that up to 19% of people who use prescription-based painkillers develop an addiction to them, any treatment that relieves pain without drugs like opioids is worth exploring.

Trigger point injections can also reduce your reliance on over-the-counter medications.

From our experience, we’ve seen patients find meaningful relief from musculoskeletal pain with trigger point injections, and we find the treatment to be long on benefits and short on downsides.

To determine whether your pain might benefit from trigger point injections, please call or message us today at one of our offices in Waco, Arlington, Wichita Falls, and Fort Worth, Texas, to set up an appointment.