Scientific rigour is my top priority; pseudoscientific ideas about trigger points are debunked here. It’s an earnest and skeptical exploration of the biology and half-baked science of trigger points. This could give you a fighting chance of at least taking the edge off your pain, and maybe that is a bit of a miracle. For veterans who have already tried — and failed — to treat severe trigger points, this document is especially made for you. Some are gobsmacked by the discovery that their chronic pain could have been treated so easily all along. I get a lot of email from readers thanking me for pointing out simple treatment options for such irritating problems. But trigger points can and do co-exist with any other kind of painful problem. Check all that apply — if you have more than half of these, and no other apparent explanation for your pain, you probably have a trigger point or two. Although there are many causes of pain, confirming a trigger point diagnosis is simple enough for most people, most of the time. There are many other possible causes of unexplained pain, but trigger points are an interesting piece of the puzzle for many people, and knowing about them offers some potential for relief. A couple major competing ideas are that it’s a more purely sensory disturbance, or the pain of slightly irritated peripheral nerves, a type of peripheral neuropathy. This medication may affect blood sugar levels. Get emergency help if you develop signs or symptoms of a heart attack or stroke. They will need to check the level of testosterone in your blood. Your care team will tell you when your next injection is due. Trigger points are more clinically important than most health pros realize, and body pain seems to be a growing problem.7 It’s a rewarding topic for doctors and therapists, a clear path to helping some people you probably couldn’t help before. You’ve hit the jackpot if you’re serious about understanding muscle pain. This isn’t a guide to "fixing" trigger points; it’s a guide to giving you a fighting chance with tougher cases. Trigger point therapy isn’t "too good to be true" — it’s probably just ordinary good. TrP treatment is not rocket science1 — it’s much too experimental to be so exact! Trigger point therapy is mostly rubbing and pressing on trigger points, which can feel amazingly relieving. Many people have a sore spot in the upper gluteus maximus, but pain in this location often spreads either up into the low back and/or down into the rest of the gluteals and hamstrings. This is where trigger points really get interesting. Trigger points are a common alternative explanation. Note that the "tender points" of fibromyalgia are not the same thing as trigger points.41 Add to that the fact that both conditions are controversial to the point where some people deny they even exist, and it’s understandable that they get confused. They may be two sides of the same painful coin, or overlapping parts on a spectrum of sensory malfunction, or different stages of the same process. FM and MPS are both imperfect, imprecise labels for closely related sets of unexplained symptoms, which makes them harder to tell apart than mischievous twins who deliberately impersonate each other. MPS is just one of many possible explanations for the pain of fibromyalgia, but it could also be a meaningful diagnosis in its own right. Fibromyalgia is a syndrome, not a disease, which means that it is unexplained by definition.39 It is just the label we give to a pattern of undiagnosed chronic widespread body pain. Fibromyalgia (FM) is the disease of "hurting all over." Fatigue, sleep disturbance, and "fibro fog" (mental confusion) are classic symptoms too. I recommend it to any professional who works with muscle (or should). If you don’t see dog-eared copies of these books, ask about them — it’s a fair, polite clue about a therapist’s competence. "Eating a diet with high saturated fats and processed sugars can lead to caloric excess and weight gain that can lower testosterone." Autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, are also linked with testosterone deficiency. This might include Kallmann’s syndrome, which is a brain development abnormality, or a pituitary disorder that might interfere with normal testosterone production, according to the Mayo Clinic.