I have a condition that causes chronic pain that I just went to a specialist for. The pain is caused by something that I can't directly treat, so everything is focused on mitigating the pain. The specialist recommended trigger point injections to me, which I don't know much about.
From what I've seen from a cursory search, the concept of trigger points is closely related to acupuncture and dry needling pseudoscience. However this treatment would be done to inject lidocaine and other medications to reduce muscle pain, I guess. What I'm unsure of is if the entire concept is known to be homeopathic bullshit, or if there's actually something to it.
I'm really unsure because the facility that does this treatment seems like an actual medical facility revolved around musculoskeletal pain conditions, but at the same time, my health insurance company also seems to fully embrace stuff like chiropractic and acupuncture as legitimate treatments that they recommend to patients.
I'd really appreciate some perspectives on this since it's so discouraging trying to find legitimate pain relief treatments that won't do more harm than good.
I mean, there's definitely something to lidocaine.
That was my initial thought. The specialist mentioned dry needling in the same breath as something "they used to do" instead, though, so I got a weird vibe about it. I guess the main idea is distracting the brain from the major source of pain, so 🤷