Physical therapy can be your ticket to getting rid of tendinitis quickly.
Tendinitis affects thousands of Americans daily. With little understanding or education about the condition, patients visit their primary care physicians hoping for a quick solution. Depending on the physician and their level of expertise in both diagnosis and treatment of tendinitis, people can get anything from: a referral to a specialist, prescription pain meds/muscle relaxants/anti-inflammatories, a steroid injection, or a script for physical therapy.
If you are lucky and want to avoid unnecessary medication, hopefully you will get a referral to a physical therapist who dry needles. Trigger point dry needling is a safe, quick and relatively painless modality that allows tendinitis to resolve naturally. How you ask? Simply put, by putting a sharp, foreign body into and through the tendon of choice two things take place. One, the immune system will ramp up to attack any foreign object that enters the body. In this case, it is sterile, surgical steel that will lead the immune system straight to the chronic inflammation that has been otherwise ignored by the body. Second, the mechanical act of the needle penetrating the tendon sheath creates a small opening for the active inflammation to exit out of the tendon. This combination explains the rapid decrease in symptoms after just a treatment or two.
The second component to preventing the tendinitis from coming back is the therapeutic exercises targeted at the weakened structures identified by a qualified physical therapist. He or she will be able to uncover which muscle groups need strengthening to prevent the excessive strain through the injured tendon in the future. This process takes a little longer. Muscles take around 5-6 weeks of dedicated effort in the form of regular progressive exercise to improve in strength.
With the combination of a well placed needle and some specific exercise, you can be assured that your tendinitis will go away and allow you to get back to doing the things you love most. If you want to know more about dry needling, therapeutic exercise or tendinitis, you can call our Bentonville physical therapy clinic at 479-268-6040.
