Muscle Adhesions: Getting in the Way of Your Performance

WHAT ARE ADHESIONS?

Our bodies contain special protein structures called connective tissue, also know as Fascia. This substance connects each part to other parts and the whole, very much like a flexible skeleton. When this tissue is healthy it is smooth and slippery, allowing the muscles, nerves, blood vessels or organs to move freely and function properly. Imagine a piece of scotch tape, the smooth side is healthy fascia; the sticky side is scar tissue or unhealthy fascia. Rub the tape along your skin, both sides, to "feel" what an adhesion is like. The drag that you feel, the "pulling" sensation, is what an adhesion is like. These adhesions attach to muscles, nerves and lymph decreasing their ability to work properly. You really know when you have an adhesion on a nerve; you get many abnormal sensations like numbness, tingling or pain.

DOESN'T STRETCHING GET RID OF ADHESIONS?

Stretching plays a very important role in the treatment and prevention of injuries but it will not break down adhesions. Adhesions, or scar tissue, are much stronger than normal healthy tissue. Muscle groups can often adhere/bind to one another preventing the normal sliding necessary for full mobility. When an individual performs a stretch, the tissue that lengthens is not the adhered tissue but the healthy tissue. This can actually cause more damage to healthy tissue resulting in the increase of adhesions. Stretching correctly is still essential, but it will never release the restrictions that are already present.

HOW WILL EXERCISES AND STRETCHING THAT DID NOT WORK BEFORE, WORK AFTER (ART) TREATMENTS?

Stretching and exercises are only effective after the dysfunction within the soft-tissue structures have been correctly released. Stretching and exercising dysfunctional tissues will only lead to a dysfunctional result. The combination of finding the origin of the problem, (ART) treatments, functional training, stretching and behavioral modifications will result in long lasting results...

HOW DO OVERUSE CONDITIONS OCCUR?

Over-used muscles (and other soft tissues) change in three important ways:

• Acute conditions (pulls, tears, collisions, etc),
• Accumulation of small tears (micro-trauma)
• Not getting enough oxygen (hypoxia).

Each of these factors can cause your body to produce tough, dense scar tissue in the affected area. This scar tissue binds up and ties down tissues that need to move freely. As scar tissue builds up, muscles become shorter and weaker, tension on tendons causes tendonitis, and nerves can become trapped. This can cause reduced range of motion, loss of strength, and pain. If a nerve is trapped, you may also feel tingling, numbness, and weakness.

This article originally appeared on performance-therapy.com

BOOK ONLINE FOR YOUR MASSAGE THERAPY, DRY NEEDLING AND CUPPING MASSAGE NEEDS TO ADDRESS SCAR TISSUE AND MUSCLE ADHESION ISSUES.

Emergency doctors are using Acupuncture to treat pain, now here’s the evidence

Emergency medicine is not all about life and death situations and high-tech solutions. Our study, the largest of its kind in the world, shows using acupuncture in the emergency department can relieve acute pain.

The study, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia, finds acupuncture is as effective as medication in treating pain for lower back pain and ankle sprain. But it took more than an hour for either to provide adequate pain relief.

Our study builds on previous research to show the effectiveness of acupuncture to treat chronic (long-term) pain.

Yet, there are several barriers to using acupuncture routinely in emergency departments.

What is acupuncture and who practices it?

Using acupuncture to relieve pain involves placing needles in various parts of the body to stimulate the release of endorphins and other neurochemicals, which can act as the body’s naturally occurring pain relievers.

For generations various cultures around the world have used acupuncture to treat multiple conditions, including providing pain relief. And in Australia, it is reimbursed through the Medicare Benefits Schedule when administered by a medical doctor.

Further reading: Modern acupuncture: panacea or placebo?

Acupuncture is one of the most accepted forms of complementary medicine among Australian general practitioners. It also appears in treatment guidelines for doctors in how to manage pain.

Why we ran the study and what we did

Anecdotally, we were aware that several emergency department doctors, in both public and private hospitals in Australia, were treating patients’ pain with acupuncture. But until this large federally-funded study, no-one had set up a trial like it to show how effective it was.

Our trial was an “equivalence” study, which means we aimed to see if the different treatments were equivalent rather than seeing if they were better than placebo. We did this as it would not be ethical to give a placebo to people coming to an emergency department for pain relief.

So, we randomly assigned more than 500 patients to receive standard painkillers, standard painkillers plus acupuncture, or acupuncture alone when they presented with back pain, migraine or ankle sprain at four Melbourne hospitals (some private, some public). While the patients knew which treatment they had, the researchers involved in assessing their pain didn’t (known as a single-blind study).

The type of acupuncture we used included applying needles at specific points on the body for each condition, as well as along points chosen by the treating acupuncturist. This was to reflect what would happen during regular clinical practice.

Doctors who were also qualified medical acupuncturists and practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (registered in Victoria with the Chinese Medicine Registration Board of Australia) performed the acupuncture.

After treatment, we assessed patients’ pain after an hour, and every hour until discharge. We also rang them for an update 24-48 hours after being discharged.

What we found

We found acupuncture, either alone or with painkillers, was equivalent to drugs-alone in providing pain relief for lower back pain, ankle sprain, but not for migraine.

When patients looked back on their treatment, the vast majority (around 80%) were satisfied with their treatment regardless of which treatment they had.

However, no treatment provided good pain relief until after the first hour.

What are the implications?

Our findings suggest acupuncture may be a viable option for patients who come to the emergency department for pain relief. This is especially important for those who cannot or choose not to have analgesic drugs.

This is also an important finding in light of the potential for side effects and abuse with opioid analgesics, which might otherwise be used to relieve pain in the emergency department.

Previous research shows using acupuncture to treat chronic pain is comparable to morphine, is safer and doesn’t lead to dependence. Our findings suggest acupuncture also has a role in treating acute pain.

However, our research raises several issues, not only about conducting such research but also in implementing our findings in practice.

We had to overcome many ethical, policy and regulatory issues before we started. These included issues around the qualifications of medical and non-medical acupuncturists and employing traditional Chinese medicine practitioners to deliver acupuncture in a western medical hospital.

And to more widely implement our findings, we need to discuss the type of practitioners best placed to deliver acupuncture in hospital, what type of training they need to work in the emergency department and what type of conditions they should treat.

Hopefully, our study will spark further research to address these issues and lead to the development of safe and effective protocols for acute pain relief that may involve combining both modern and ancient forms of medicine to achieve rapid and effective analgesia for all emergency department patients.

This article originally appeared on theconversation.com

Summer Self Care Series

Learn how to maintain your own physical health with practical lessons on self care. Methods taught at any of our workshops are designed to be replicated by you with ease.

Restoring your appreciation for how your own body works, moves, copes and mends is the way to maintain physical health with healthy long term patterns and habits. Once you learn why or how something happens you can dismantle the confusion around a symptom or pain. Build confidence by first learning how your body functions, understanding it's structure, alignment and current state by testing, assessing and practicing forms of muscle release and gentle restorative exercise.

Self care is resilience. Reach your long term health care goals with our Reset Wellness Summer Self Care Series.

For online registration visit our Classes page.

Fitness That Feels Good

Our bodies are amazing

They adapt to the needs of our environment. We are dynamic and always changing. Our old cells dying and the new forming every second. Because of our ever changing selves we can never be perfect. That's okay. Our imperfections are what challenge us and make us great. With the help of knowing a little fitness training, manual therapies and proper assessment, we can learn, build and improve on our body. This is important for everyone, to have the knowledge of how to live and maintain a life in their body.

Fitness training is good for us and to understand why we have to know the primary components of fitness we're trying to improve on. Cardiorespiratory capacity (lungs); muscular capacity (endurance, strength, and power); flexibility and body composition.

How are the choices of people in your life and yours being reflected in the way your body expresses motion and emotion? Our choices and environment influence and, in some cases, define us. Its health and ours become an expression in our body. How we choose to participate is our character. Unfortunately--with most goals--there are no shortcuts. The good news: whenever you decide to move your muscles--from small movements to large, you are hitting all the components of fitness simultaneously. Reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, normalizing blood pressure, increasing muscle strength, strengthening your bones, increasing metabolisms, improving your mood, reducing stress levels and making yourself look good all at the same time. It really is amazing how much our health gives us. If we give our bodies a little daily attention they will give us much in return.

As independent as many of us like to seem, the truth is we all need other people. Everybody needs support from time to time. Everybody needs help, including our bodies. The natural healing process of inflammation can be manipulated in our favor using massage and other manual therapies. It can mobilize tissues to increase blood flow to the muscles that need it most, aiding in tissue repair. It can even create stability where there was once instability. Let's say, you rolled your ankle: a massage therapist can stimulate a targeted inflammatory response, encouraging the body to then lay down additional connective tissue fibers, reinforcing the damaged or torn ligament. It can 'unstick' unwanted adhesions from your bones that reduce your range of motion, thereby encouraging fluidity of joint movement. Adhesions 'stick' to healthy tissues and drag when you fire up your muscles, causing them to work harder. So, wider range of motion means wider steps, which means faster, more fluid movement, energy efficient, no pain and overall just better.

A question I could ask all of you is, what is your work out routine, and why? Do you know why you work out the muscles you do and in the way you choose to? Do you sometimes increase you weight, or change your routine in some way and random little aches and pains pop up? Do you ever brush it off as your body isn't used to it, or you're just getting old, or getting over a cold? Maybe it's actually none of those things. Maybe, you're doing something you shouldn't be doing. Maybe you're doing something incorrectly. This is why a proper assessment from a professional is key before and during fitness training.

How do we get you moving in the most pain free and efficient way possible. In order to meet your goals both you and your team of health care team need to uncover what needs more attention, what needs less, and a professional can make recommendations to you during your journey for an easier and efficient approach. This can create faster results and avoid injury by being careful not to over exert certain muscles. For example, a desk jockey might be trying to make a small positive change in their routine by taking the stairs. They have a hard time activating their glutes since the gluteus maximus has a tendency not to activate until other muscles are becoming fatigued and they need to. The gluteus maximus can be lazy that way. This will then cause the quads to take over in a compensating action, possibly pulling the pelvis forward and down. This could create low back pain, or knee pain, and how would the desk jockey know what he's doing wrong? He's trying to take the stairs to be healthy.

            There is so much information out there, and we as health professionals want to help you sift through all of it to find what works for you, what doesn't, and for you to eventually know what it feels like to feel better than you ever thought you could. I used to be so afraid of the gym, and which work outs to choose from, which stretches - I was so overwhelmed. But if I've learned anything from choosing this path, it's that it's better to do something than nothing. The journey to a healthy lifestyle doesn't start the same for anyone. Try one minute of plank a day, or three minutes of jumping jacks, stomp in a rain puddle, pick literally anything. Just pick health. All that matters, is you try, in any way you can. Trust me, your body will.

Written by Miranda Horvath of Reset Wellness, Deep Tissue and Fitness Specialist, RMT.