Manual Physical Therapy: Intramuscular Manual Therapy

A newer treatment technique in the field of Physical Therapy is Intramuscular Manual Therapy.  On first impressions it may look similiar to accupuncture, but the theory behind it is completely different.  We recently interviewed an expert on the subject and asked him a few questions.

Here are some of his answers:

Interviewer: So, if we just expand on that a little bit from the patient perspective, what should they expect?  Should it be a little bit uncomfortable, painful, not painful, and how immediate after should they know if Intramuscular Manual Therapy has been a good thing or not?

Expert: Again, a great question to ask.  It’s something that we need to address because dosing is always a big question.  How much do you do in a session, because it can be uncomfortable?

I never call it painful because pain is always associated with a negative and they’re coming to us because they often already have pain.  What we describe it as is at times an intense cramping sensation.

If we can reproduce their symptoms with it we find that we have greater success.  I expect my patients to actually have an immediate change with this treatment technique, especially when we get a good twitch response in the tissue that is actually involved in their dysfunction.

Depending on how much we do in a session will also determine how much change we also cause.  Every patient responds very differently to the technique.

It also depends on how chronic the patient is.  If they have a very chronic low back dysfunction it may take longer for them to see bigger changes, whereas if it’s a very acute problem they may see 70 to 100 percent change in one to two sessions with regards to their pain.  It doesn’t mean their full dysfunction is gone, but the actual pain that they’re suffering from can decrease significantly in a very quick way.

With regards to post-treatment soreness we expect one to two days of soreness that we would associate with kind of the feeling of working out hard.  So, if you workout and your muscles are sore afterwards it’s kind of the same feeling that a patient gets.

If it’s more than that then we actually ask them to come back in to the clinic to make sure they don’t have a trigger point that’s flared up, that the tissue itself may be very unhealthy and there’s a lot of metabolic chemicals in that tissue that are leaching out now that you’ve released it and that’s causing a lot of soreness.  Very similar to that lactic acid sensation of the tissue status post exercise like DOMS would be.

It’s delayed onset muscle soreness.

So again, education of the patient is very important with this because they expect to have some soreness afterwards, but it should be less than what they actually came in with.

Manual Physical Therapy – Manual Physical Therapy from HealthAndFitness101. Like this? Watch the latest episode of HealthAndFitness101 on Blip! http://blip.tv/healthandfitness101/watc…