Is muscle pain, weakness, or stiffness keeping you tossing and turning each night? If you struggle to find a reason behind this frustration, here’s a possibility that you may not have considered—fibromyalgia. This disorder not only affects memory, concentration, and energy levels, but its associated chronic pain can leave you unable to achieve a restful night of sleep.
The Relationship of Fibromyalgia and Sleep Problems
Fibromyalgia and sleep disturbances go hand in hand: the painful symptoms of fibromyalgia can make it difficult – if not impossible – to achieve the deep and restful sleep that you need to lead a healthy life. Unfortunately, many other common symptoms of fibromyalgia are heightened by a lack of sleep. For a fibromyalgia sufferer, this lack of sleep becomes both a symptom and a trigger, making the management of fibromyalgia sleep problems crucial.
Trigger Point Injections for Fibromyalgia Pain Relief
While there is no one fibromyalgia treatment that works for everyone, the pain management physicians at Physician Partners of America have found that many patients respond well to trigger point injections. In fibromyalgia sufferers, trigger points are areas of acute musculoskeletal pain and spasm; pain often begins in these areas as a result of tension in the muscles and radiates outwards, contributing to the full-body chronic pain that is common to fibromyalgia. Though some trigger points arise as a result of physical trauma, such as bruising or hairline fractures, they can also occur spontaneously when a muscle spasms. These trigger points are a major cause of having difficulty sleeping—not only are they painful on their own, but pressure from the trigger point can cause pain to radiate outwards to the rest of the body.
Trigger point injections, or TPIs, combat the painful effects of trigger points by injecting a small amount of anesthetic, corticosteroid, or muscle relaxant directly into the trigger point itself. This extremely localized treatment provides near-instant relief for trigger point pain and can help fibromyalgia sufferers avoid dependence on painkillers. Even better, our pain relief physicians have found that once treated, individual trigger points rarely reoccur, making TPIs among the longest-lasting relief for fibromyalgia sufferers!
