Pain often stems from soft tissue, including fascia, ligaments, muscles, nerves, and tendons. These tissues don’t always need to suffer serious damage to contribute to pain. Injuries and overuse can cause inflammation, fibrosis, and adhesions, conditions that cause soft tissues to work against each other, rather than cooperatively.
Active release technique (ART) is a noninvasive, manual therapy that practitioners use to free up tight and trapped tissue, restoring normal conditions in the body, and this in turn generally relieves pain.
It’s a therapy that the team at Active Care Chiropractic & Rehabilitation recommends for many of our patients, including those plagued by chronic pain. Let’s take a closer look at ART and how it might help you.
The soft tissue systems in your body normally work together. Tendons connect muscles to bones, ligaments attach bones together, and muscles contract and expand to create motion.
Muscle groups are enclosed in fascia, a thin, slippery sheath that reduces friction, while blood vessels supply the fuel and nerve tissues deliver motion signals from the brain.
With injury, whether acute or from repeated strain, disorders begin to affect soft tissue. Ligaments and tendons become inflamed, muscles may be bruised, fascia tissue forms clumps of scar tissue, and blood vessels and nerves become restricted or pinched.
These conditions, alone or in combination, can contribute to nonspecific chronic pain that can reduce your mobility and drain your energy.
Patients familiar with chiropractic care know that it’s a hands-on therapy designed to identify and treat subluxations of the joints of the spine and other locations throughout the body. ART has a similar hands-on philosophy that goes beyond joints and treats the supporting soft tissue that could be contributing to chronic pain and lost flexibility.
The adhesions and other restrictions involving soft tissue are the direct target of ART treatments. In a session lasting about 15 minutes, we diagnose and treat trapped soft tissue.
Your practitioner applies pressure to problem areas while moving your joints through a series of motions designed to free up trapped blood vessels and nerves, as well as breaking up myofascial scar tissue to restore optimal muscle movement.
It doesn’t matter if your chronic pain is sharp or achy, or if you have numbness and tingling accompanying the pain. ART may be an effective treatment for conditions like:
A visit to Active Care Chiropractic & Rehabilitation establishes how ART can help, on its own or in conjunction with our other therapies. Contact our nearest office to book your consultation today.
