Most everyone experiences a headache at some point, but some people are prone to chronic and debilitating head pain that interferes with their lives in significant ways. If you fall into this unfortunate group, you’ve likely exhausted the over-the-counter medications that don’t seem to even come close to remedying your pain.
Here at Bryn Medical, we pride ourselves on tackling chronic headaches from every angle to garner effective and long-lasting solutions that don’t simply mask the pain. As part of our treatment plan, we’ve had great success with our patients in Chattanooga, Tennessee, using trigger point injections.
If you’d like to explore how trigger point injections may work to remedy your chronic headaches, read on.
Loosening the knot
Your body is an incredibly complex system where everything is somehow connected, which is especially true of your soft tissue, including your muscles. If you’ve ever had a small muscle spasm, you understand how that small knot of muscle can cause both localized and radiating pain that affects your surrounding muscle. This is because your complex network of muscle is being pulled by the knot of tension. Imagine pulling at the center of a spider web and the effect it has on every thread in that web as they’re drawn taut.
These knots in your muscles are what we call trigger points — a ground zero for your pain. With trigger point injections, we release the tension at its source by injecting a local anesthetic that immediately relaxes the knot and its pull on the muscles that are connected to it.
If you’re sensitive to anesthetics, believe it or not we can often release your muscle knot through dry needling, which means that we insert a needle without injecting anything. When the needle penetrates the knot, it can provide enough of a “diversion” for the muscle spasm to let go. We’d like to point out, however, that the anesthetic does work more quickly to alleviate your pain.
Bringing it to your head
While there are dozens of different types of headaches, the ones that lead the charge in causing problematic and chronic pain are tension headaches and migraines. Tension headaches often feel like your head is in a vice grip as the muscles pull painfully around your head, as well as around your neck and jaw, often traveling down to your shoulders.
After we thoroughly examine you and review your symptoms to identify the trigger point that may be responsible for the radiating pain, we inject that area, which provides you with immediate, much-needed relief.
When it comes to migraines, these headaches are largely neurological, but they have a systemic effect on your body and often create knots of tension in your muscles that exacerbate the headache. Here again, we can assess your symptoms to find where the muscle tension originates from and administer a trigger point injection for fast and effective relief.
In many cases, you may have more than one trigger point, which we work to identify as we go so that you’re afforded a lasting reprieve from your head pain.
Which came first?
While tension headaches and migraines are considered primary headaches, you may experience secondary headaches that stem from myofascial pain brought on by the trigger points themselves, especially those in your neck and shoulders. If we determine that this is the cause of your headache, trigger point injections are, far and away, the best way to address the myofascial pain that’s causing your headache. By getting straight to the trigger points that are responsible for the referred pain in your head, we tackle both issues at once for long-lasting success.
If you suffer from chronic headaches that resist most conventional treatments, we invite you to explore how trigger point injections may be just the solution you’re looking for. Please give us a call or use the online scheduling tool on this website to book an appointment.