Muscles

Muscle tissues are involved in all of our movements and can easily become injured and painful. The pain from muscular overuse or injury is often short lived because abundant blood circulation in muscle tissue helps the tissues heal quickly. For example, when your muscles are fatigued from overuse, waste products accumulate within the muscle tissue. This may cause muscle stiffness, soreness and pain, but because a rich blood supply helps remove those waste products, the pain usually abates overnight or within a few days or a week, at most. It is possible to have such a severe tear in a muscle that pain and scar tissue formation can become chronic, but this is fairly rare.

Most people think that their muscles cause most of the pain in their backs, necks, shoulders, hips, thighs and so forth, and they think the pain indicates that a muscle is injured. In fact, these things are not always true. There are several reasons for this misunderstanding. In one case, pain is perceived as occurring in the muscles, when in actuality it is a referred pain caused by injury to another structure in the body. For instance, the pain from an injured tissue such as a ligament may be felt in muscles located several inches to several feet from the injured tissue, hence the term referred pain. A back ligament injury may, for example, cause pain in the groin, front thigh, shin and foot. There are many structures in the body which, if injured, can refer pain to very distant sites.

Another reason for the confusion is that muscles will often contract, sometimes violently, as a result of injuries to other structures. A muscle spasm is usually referred to as a "secondary phenomenon" because it occurs in response to the actual injury (the primary phenomenon). This protective spasm is triggered when a movement is made that begins to impinge on the an injured structure.

A muscle spasm doesn't help you know what's injured; in fact, it actually confuses most people, including healthcare professionals not skilled in identifying precise causes of pain. That's because a muscle spasm will occur with many kinds of injuries and disease processes: a torn ligament or tendon, a disc pressing on a nerve, an irritation within a joint, a severe tear in a muscle, an infection, a tumor, cancer of the spine, and many other conditions. Our focus is in the area of musculoskeletal pain. If, for example, a disc is injured and presses on a nerve when you sit or bend forward, this will cause a great deal of pain. As a protective mechanism, when you begin to bend forward, the muscles may suddenly contract, giving you a momentary pain to send the message "Don't do that or your nerve will really become inflamed and painful". Or, if a ligament in your neck is sprained and inflamed, causing pain when you turn your head to the right, your body is again sending you a strong message; the muscles may spasm and hurt briefly to tell you to stop doing that movement. When trying to assess an injury, keep in mind that a muscle spasm is usually the result of an injury, not an injury itself.

Adhesive Scar Tissue