Why is it, when I’m getting (or giving) a massage, that when you find the little hard bumps that seem to be the source of pain, they move? What exactly are these bumps and how can they seemingly move several inches?
In: 132
So, gonna upset a lot of people with this one but:
They’re nothing. Well, they are definitely not trigger points, tense muscles, “knots” of muscles, or anything concrete or clinically relevant. They are probably just tendons and normal variations of muscle. Practitioners of various disciplines like massage, chiro, physio, etc. can’t even reliably identify such “knots.” ([See here.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28098584/)) Further, these kinds of areas are not clinically associated with any reliable effect–lots of people with “knots” have no pain and lots of people with pain have no identifiable knots. ([See here for example.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20015697/))
At the end of the day, it’s a pseudoscientific concept that catches our “hey that makes sense” button but actually has no evidence to support it.
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