Soft Tissue Manipulation for Scarring: Is Your Body Healing Completely?
Written by Jo Hodges, LMT PA#MSG015344
The season of bike trails, swimming, and marathons is upon us! Summer means getting up and getting going for many Americans, especially with the sun shining into the evening as the solstice passes. As the days get hotter and hotter, has an old injury of yours come back to throw a wrench in your plans? During these warm months, the rate of sports and accidental injury is much higher, even if you’re training year-round. How are you getting back on your feet after pulling a muscle, aching from overdoing an exercise, or spraining your ankle?
Injuries are a complicated part of the body, and as you go through the healing process, they’re everchanging and difficult. There are good and bad days, even ten to twenty years after the injury happened. In a study conducted by Deflorin et al. in 2008, they found that massage therapy is one of the most effective methods of injury recovery, helping to significantly reduce scar tissue pain management, discoloration, pliability, itchiness, and scar thickness. Through examination of other journals published prior, they also discovered that medical authors tended to have an unconscious bias towards massage techniques, not using them in the same intervals as other methods and causing the results to vary significantly. In this way, a lot of people seeking treatment via massage have this same bias – they try one session, it doesn’t help their chronic pain immediately, and they move on to the next method. Consistency is key when it comes to helping with a buildup of scar tissue and pain from old and new injuries.
As a massage therapist works on your body, the muscles causing you pain tend to fight back against manipulation, known as an extension of your muscle memory. Since your muscles are so used to being in that position from injury recovery, massage can help to train your body back into the correct weight distribution, posture, etc. Because muscle memory develops over time, a decades-old injury can still act up if you overexert yourself. Instrument-assisted soft tissue manipulation, or IASTM, at Monacella Massage & Kinesiology mixes our massage techniques with tools like the HawkGrips HGPro Multi-Instrument to boost the effects of an ordinary massage, breaking up adhesions and stubborn scar tissue. It gives a deeper massage to help with lasting results for pain and injuries, making sure that your injury can heal to the best of its abilities, and limiting issues with muscle memory in the future!
As always, massages should be catered to your needs; if you’re hesitant about an acute injury such as a sprain, check with your doctor or physical therapist to make sure IASTM is the right choice for you. With injuries, quick recovery can rely on how often treatment is administered, and how long you’ve waited to get treated in the first place. We now have a convenient secondary location inside Rise Up Physical Therapy at 2311 West 15th St., Erie PA, to make healing easier and more manageable! The last thing you want to be doing when you’re in pain is running around. Give us a call at (814) 838-3622 or check out our online scheduling today to start feeling better, whether your injury is recent or twenty years old!