Under the direction of Stuart Donaldson, Ph.D., EMTA, BCFE, ABDA, we at Myosymmetries have come to focus on muscles as research has increasingly shown that in ailments such as chronic back pain, much of the pain is actually coming from the muscles. If you can treat the muscles, you greatly ease the pain.
 
The muscle damage alone can have a lasting and serious effects.

Traditional therapy treats the site where the pain is felt and may include strengthening the surrounding muscles, but that often is not effective in a lasting way.

At Myosymmetries, we look at the whole body system, not just the pain.

Correcting muscle damage involves more than simply strengthening a muscle, because the neurological function of the muscle, as well as the muscle fiber, is damaged.

Most often it happens when a stretch is imposed upon a muscle that is already lengthened - for instance, if you're rear ended while your head is turned, your neck muscles will be more severely damaged than muscles that were straight and in balance at the moment of impact.

Severe chilling or fatigue can also decrease the inhibitory signal.

That decrease in the inhibitory signal can be simply understood as poorly regulated motor control.

Poor motor control leads to the development of the trigger points in the muscles as the members of the pair of muscles perform unevenly, one being hyperactive and the other becoming dormant.

In turn, the trigger points refer pain in sites that are seemingly unrelated, but in fact follow a consistent and well documented pattern.

If one muscle is dormant or near dormant, its counterpart on the other side of the body has to work twice as hard to make up for it. Over time, the working muscle becomes chronically fatigued and painful.

The innovative thinking that underlies the work at Myosymmetries starts with the recognition that anatomically, you can look at a muscle by itself, but physiologically you can't, because muscles work in pairs.

That means that addressing the pain in the overworked muscle involves reawakening the dormant, injured one to do its job.

But even treating the muscles effectively isn't enough by itself.

The central nervous system becomes involved when each individual disturbed muscle reflex sends a signal of pain up the spine to the brain and the total bombardment becomes too much.

Constant stimulation of the brain by pain alters the brain's activity as the messages become diffused around the original receptor in the brain.

As more parts of the brain become affected by pain, those parts in turn send wrong messages to the areas of the body they direct, and the pain communication becomes circular.

That changes the biochemical activity in the brain, and the cycle of body pain and confused brain messaging becomes self perpetuating.

At the same time that the pain is increasing by means of diffusion of messages in the brain, the pain originating in the muscles is increasing.

The brain must be re-educated through biofeedback to receive and send messages accurately, or else the muscle pain will simply recur as the brain continues to send out its habitual wrong messages.

By the time people come to Myosymmetries, with or without a diagnosis of fibromyalgia, they are struggling with chronic pain and the mental fog, forgetfulness, exhaustion and sleep disorder caused by the biochemical changes in the brain.

They often are also carrying the burden of despair because they have been told "it's all in your head", when nothing irregular has shown up on an x-ray or in a muscle biopsy.

Be assured that at Myosymmetries, with our multi-disciplinary approach to pain, we offer understanding, explanations, hope, and comprehensive, effective treatment.

A frequent cause of chronic muscle pain is whiplash, caused by an automobile accident or any other severe jolt to the body. Whiplash is a multi-dimensional injury. The brain is shaken, joints are affected, and muscles are damaged.