This blog helps people with muscle and joint pain to understand their pain and employ safe, proven self-care to get relief. Also, it also helps massage and bodywork practitioners to understand anatomical relationships and therapeutic approaches for these patterns.*
Resources for People in Pain
Look up your pain pattern.
Many people suffer from some form of muscle aches and pain. Most pain is part of a known pattern and seldom unique or mysterious. This blog helps you to identify patterns created by myofascial trigger points. Over the years, extensive research has shown the pain patterns and impaired activities that each trigger point creates. The descritions on this site descriptions are simpler, easier to read versions of the clinical research texts.
Musculoskeletal pain usually originates from a point away from the actual sensation. These posts describe where the trigger point lives and what aggravates it. Follow the links in these posts to strategies for quick relief, how to get lasting relief, the anatomy that underlies the pain pattern, and more…
Clinically Proven Strategies That You Can Use at Home
This section has guidelines for standard self-care activities like using an ice pack and how to stretch. It also contains common stretches and exercises. I have used these in my practice for years with safe, reliable results.
If you’re looking for specific suggestions that are related to a particular problem, look up the pain pattern. You’ll find a self-care that is more specifically related pattern.
Collections of Posts Related to a Condition
This section discusses conditions and syndromes like; TMJ Syndrome, Frozen Shoulder, Foot Drop, Cervicogenic headache, Sensory integration Dysfunction, and more. Most of these collections have a brief description of the condition and a gallery of posts that are related to that condition. Self-care is usually found in the posts that describe the associated myofascial pattern. Some of these collections have a separate self-care section for the condition.
Resources for Massage and Bodywork
Treatment Notes, Protocols, and more…
Therapy Resources include treatment notes, anatomy, therapy concepts, the framework of therapy and more.
- Therapy Concepts: These posts include concepts and allegories about physiology, methodology, and a framework for therapy.
- By pain pattern: Each pain pattern has links to Functional Anatomy and Therapy Notes. In turn, Therapy Notes offers ideas on treatment sequencing with links to the associated protocols. You can look up pain patterns by region of the body here.
- By Muscle: Each muscle has a list of all of the associated posts for that muscle. You can look up muscles by region of the body here.
This section lists anatomy, mostly musculoskeletal, for the bodyworker, by region. The illustrations create a focus on the attached bones and local joints. At the end of each post, there is a grid of related posts, including related pain patterns, therapy notes, treatment protocols, etc.
Legends, Discoveries, and Clinical Experiences.
These posts explore a few different kinds of people and events. It explores a few of the people who had the vision and persistence that shaped fields of bodywork. Also, it explores events that have happened in the therapy room and have reshaped the direction of this work. Also, there are stories outside of the therapy room with colleagues and friends.