Patient Resources
Message from Jennifer Chu, M.D.
Dear Patient:
We look forward to helping you with the diagnosis and management of your acute and/or chronic nerve related muscle discomfort and/or pain. Muscle discomfort and/or pain relieving results are achieved when nerve muscle meeting points known as trigger points can be located and stimulated within a given time frame of a session. From the type of twitches elicited by eToims®, you will be able to understand the health status of your nerves and muscles. Significant spasm and tightness of the muscles produce low force twitches since the trigger points are difficult to locate. On the other hand, strong force twitches result when trigger points can be located and stimulated. Therefore, from the quality of twitches elicited, you will soon become educated on your possibility of achieving pain relief with each eToims® session. Depending on the quality of twitches, patients may be able to achieve discomfort and/or pain relief even with the very first session and cumulative results can accrue as sessions continue.
Chronic pain leads not only to suffering from the intensity of the physical pain but also to suffering from emotional pain due to the disbelief of others. The electrodiagnostic studies and the nerve and muscle responses during eToims® sessions will help objectively document and quantify your nerve related muscle pain.
eToims® Twitch Relief Method is your faithful partner that can help lessen the physical and emotional burdens along your path to a better quality of life.
Jennifer Chu, M.D.
About Nerve-Related Soft Tissue Symptoms
Acute and chronic trauma to nerve roots and peripheral nerves leads to muscle discomfort and/or pain, tingling/numbness, weakness or fatigue. Patients may remain undiagnosed and/or inadequately treated because, when nerve problems are in their early stages, standard diagnostic approaches may not always reveal presence or extent of injury.
Many patients and athletes come to a doctor's office often complaining of pain in a part of their body that appears to be unrelated to a spinal nerve-root injury, e.g., pain in a joint, chest wall, or genital organs. In today's current state of medicine, conventional diagnoses and treatments will focus only on the symptomatic or the complained-about body part. What these patients require is a thorough physical examination and a quantitative electrodiagnostic studies to determine if their symptoms are related to spinal nerve-root irritation.
Even when a spinal nerve-root problem is suspected, if the MRI scan and/or CAT scan of the spine is negative, the patient is presumed not to have a spinal nerve-root problem. However, it is not uncommon for MRI scans and/or CAT scans of the spine to be normal even when a spinal nerve-root problem does exist, because such diagnostic tests cannot detect nerve-root irritation.
Likewise, it is not uncommon for partial spinal nerve-root injuries to go undetected during a neurological examination because routine neurological examinations only test for such deficits as loss of reflexes, muscle weakness, and/or alteration of sensation.
Because of these diagnostic-technique deficiencies, it is possible for patients suffering from soft tissue and/or joint pain on a continual basis to have their conditions incorrectly diagnosed (soft tissues are the nerves, muscles, fascia, tendons, ligaments, etc.) The fascia is a sheet of fibrous tissue beneath the surface of the skin, enveloping the body, enclosing muscles or muscular groups, and separating the muscular layers.
A thorough physical examination with special emphasis on the neuromusculoskeletal system and quantitative electromyography (QEMG) and nerve conduction studies (NCS) provide important information. By using pressure over the tender points within the muscles, signs of autonomic nervous system instability, such as excessive redness of the skin (vasomotor changes), excessive sweating (sudomotor changes), and goose pimpling of the skin over just the tested side of the body (pilomotor changes) can be detected. Other physical signs such as muscle swelling, tightness and presence of taut myofascial bands indicate muscle shortening and spasm stemming from spinal nerve-root irritation.
When nerve roots are irritated, they signal the muscles to shorten (spasm). When the muscles spasm, they compress the nerves and blood vessels that are within them and pull (traction effect or mechanical tension) on the tendons, bones, joints, and ligaments to which they attach. Nerve-related (neuropathic) pain is maintained by this constant pulling by muscles that are unable to adequately relax. As these muscles continuously pull on the nerve roots, the nerve roots are unceasingly irritated and continue signaling the muscles to spasm. This self-perpetuating cycle of nerve-root irritation and muscle spasm is what creates nerve related muscle pain.
If undiagnosed and/or inadequately treated, symptoms may increase in severity and spread through the body resulting in wide-spread disabling body pain known as fibromyalgia. Consequently, patients suffering from unrelenting soft-tissue discomfort and/or pain that has not responded to standard or alternative treatment should have their condition evaluated and treated at the eToims® Soft Tissue Comfort Center.
