Needling therapy has been widely used for pain control. " Needling " includes all procedures with penetration of a needle through the skin with injection of medication (injection therapy) or without introduction of any drug (dry needling). In either injection or dry needling, the site of treatment can be at the site of pain (direct needling) or far from the site of pain (remote needling). Needl...

OBJECTIVES Pelvic muscle tenderness occurs often in patients with urologic chronic pelvic pain syndrome; symptoms frequently can be reduced with pelvic myofascial physical therapy. This open-label pilot study evaluated the safety of a personal wand that enables patient's self-treatment of internal myofascial trigger points in the pelvic floor and its effect in reducing pelvic muscle tenderness....

Readers who are seriously interested in the promising potential of electromyographic detection of endplate noise as a gold standard for identifying TrPs and its likely limitations should be sure to consider the comments on and compare the papers by Couppe et al. and by Kuan et al. that are reviewed in this column. Those interested in writing a first-class paper on clinical research on TrPs shou...

BACKGROUND Traditional strategies for myofascial pain relief provide transient, incomplete, variable, or unpredictable outcomes. Botulinum toxin is itself an analgesic but can also cause sustained muscular relaxation, thereby possibly affording even greater relief than traditional therapies. METHODS The study goal was to determine whether direct injection of botulinum toxin type A (BoNT-A) in...

Background of the study: Myofascial trigger point (MTrP) can be defined as a hyperirritable spot in skeletal muscle that is associated with a hypersensitive palpable nodule in a taut band. MTrP is associated with pain on compression and the pain is typically of a referred type. There are various treatment modalities used for treating myofascial pain which includes individual treatment technique...

During the past few months, several new studies, reviews and case studies on myofascial pain syndrome [MPS] and myofascial trigger points [TrPs] have been published. Myofascial pain syndrome and TrPs are increasingly being recognized not only in the United States, but also in Europe. Testa and colleagues [Milan, Italy] published an excellent review article detailing the clinical signs that lead...

Myofascial pain syndrome (MPS) is a form of myalgia that is characterized by local regions of muscle hardness that are tender and that cause pain to be felt at a distance, i.e., referred pain. The central component of the syndrome is the trigger point that is composed of a tender, taut band. Stimulation of the band, either mechanically or with activity, can produce pain. The active trigger poin...