What is a soft tissue injury?
Soft tissue is made up of muscle, ligaments, and fascia. (Some people also consider nerves to be soft tissue.) The fascia is the connective tissue that covers the muscles to help them work together as a group. Let’s look at the quadriceps, for example. The quadriceps are four separate muscles. When they contract, the fascia helps them to work as one unit and exert more force than if they were working independently. In a nutshell, soft tissue injuries involve muscle strains, fascial distortions, and sprained ligaments. It could also be something like a trapped nerve.
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Soft tissue injuries present different challenges from something like a bone issue or motor pattern issue where the patient has a neurological deficit. With a soft tissue problem, a useful piece of information is typically the mechanism of injury. For example, maybe the patient took a wrong step while running. Maybe they tripped and fell or they performed a specific activity that resulted in pain. It could even happen during a certain time of the workday.
We pay close attention to the patient’s clues to answer the following questions:
- What triggers the problem?
- What are the aggravating factors?
- What (if anything) relieves the pain?
Heat, ice, medication, stretching, rest, exercise, or many other kinds of factors could alleviate the pain. Once we consider the patient’s history along with this information, it will help dictate where we should be headed for an effective treatment.
Treatment Options
For an approach that targets a specific region, massage therapy and deep tissue therapy is an efficient treatment. We’ll be targeting a particular muscle or part of the fascia with this treatment. Patients who combine manual/massage therapy with some simple exercises will typically see a better outcome than if they only used one treatment option alone.
There are many occasions where weakness in one area will result in compensation in another area. We see this very often in the upper back and traps. People who are weak in their neck flexors and neck stabilizers will end up experiencing overworked upper back muscles. Due to compensation, the muscles end up becoming tight and knotted. That’s when manual therapy or massage therapy will attack the issue most effectively.
Before anything else, we really have to spend enough time investigating the patient’s unique situation. Day one essentially involves us asking a lot of questions so we can make an thorough assessment. From there, we’ll find out any potential limitations with a functional test that screens attributes such as core strength or glute stability. The same thing applies to soft tissue—we assess the tissue manually and also listen carefully to the patient. By meshing those two things together, we can zero in on exactly what’s going on.
If you’ve experienced a soft tissue injury, contact us online or give us a call at (918) 743-3737.
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