23 Jan Soft Tissue Injury Treatment Options
When it comes to the pain of a soft tissue injury, your immediate need is relief. Your initial consultation with us will involve a treatment plan for soft tissue injury pain relief. However, it also allows us to establish a total body wellness plan to prevent injuries like this from reoccurring. Find out what to do with a soft tissue injury and find relief today!
What Is a Soft Tissue Injury?
The soft tissues in your body are your muscles, tendons and ligaments. Alone, there are at least 650 named muscles of the body. These muscles cover your organs and bones and allow you the ability to move throughout the day. A ligament is a tougher, fibrous tissue that connects to the muscles of the body. These ligaments stabilize your joints and prevent movements from happening that could damage your joints or other tissues. There are somewhere around 1,320 tendons in the body. These are another type of tissue that acts as strong, fibrous cords attaching your muscles to your bones.
You can sustain a soft tissue injury to all of these types of tissues in your body. Even blinking and breathing require the motion of your soft tissues. In our patients, common injuries include sprains, strains, tears, contusions and even problems such as tendinitis and bursitis.
How Do These Injuries Happen?
You may think that a major accident or event would cause a soft tissue injury. However, many patients actually sustain a soft tissue injury through everyday activities. You may bend down and twist wrong, resulting in a small sprain in your back. Or you might do repetitive activities such as typing or writing. Overuse of your muscles during these everyday activities can lead to problems such as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. With this, overuse causes tiny tears in the muscles, making the tendons swell, and compressing nerves. This is just one example of a soft tissue injury.
Contusions happen easily if you bump into a hard object. This is essentially a bruise, or an injury to your muscle. When you bump a muscle too hard, small veins and tiny blood vessels break, creating a discoloration on your skin. This is a minor injury and goes away within days. Some people bruise easily, and others don’t if they have tougher skin tissue. Many injuries happen from lifting something too heavy, tripping over an object or off a curb, moving too fast in sports, doing repetitive motions and similar activities. Simply not warming up or stretching properly before physical activity is the reason many people get injured. Not knowing how to do workouts properly or over-exercising can cause injuries as well.
Heal Your Muscles
Some injuries take months to heal, whereas others will begin feeling better within a few days to a week. Sprains—injuries with minimal muscle tearing—can feel better in just a few weeks. Tears, however, can take months to heal. Physical therapy can accelerate your healing time. We have this kind of therapy in our office in the form of chiropractic care, neuropathy treatment, vibration exercises, electrostimulation, customized stretches and exercises, heat and cold therapy and more.
Heat and cold therapy at home can help your injury. Directly after you sustain an injury, ice the affected area for 15-20 minutes at a time for the first 24 hours. Heat therapy might also be effective. Compression bandages, rest and elevation can all help a soft tissue injury. However, always consult our office or your physician to ensure you are doing the correct action for healing.
Working a muscle when it is injured may seem counterintuitive to actually healing, but doing the right muscle work will heal your injured muscle, tendon or ligament. Most of our patients receive some form of soothing therapy like massage therapy coupled with exercises and stretches specific to their injury in order to heal.
Vibration Exercises
Physical therapy services can help you to recover from a soft tissue injury. However, not all patients are able to exercise due to chronic conditions or disability. Vibration therapy is great for patients of advanced age or for those who have chronic conditions that don’t allow them to move well. Patients get on a vibrating platform at our center, where they will be strapped in. The machine will then send out countless vibrations that go throughout your body, boosting your circulation and giving your muscles an intense workout. Your muscles actually contract and relax dozens of times per second, while nutrient-rich blood rushes to these soft tissues.
Clinical research shows that vibration exercise is so effective at working the muscles, that patients only need to use this machine for a few minutes a day to see positive results. This therapy is so effective, that being on the machine for too long cause actually cause muscle damage. Therefore, you get an intense workout without intense effort, and you do it in just a few minutes of your day!
Healing a Soft Tissue Injury
Nobody likes to be injured. When it comes to injuries, soft tissue ones can take longer for some patients to heal than a broken bone or other injury would. However, your healing time can be accelerated with physical rehabilitation services such as customized exercises, electrostimulation, vibration therapy and more. If you’ve sustained an injury, get on the road to healing today by calling Mile High Spine & Pain Center at (720) 507-0080!