THE RESEARCH SAYS . . .
You may have heard this tale before: A kind samaritan sees a man intently searching the ground near a lamppost and asks him what he is looking for. "My car keys" the man drunkenly replies, so the samaritan joins in the search. After a few minutes, the samaritan asks whether the man is certain that he dropped the keys near the lamppost.
“No,” the man replies, is the reply, “I lost the keys somewhere across the street.” “Why look here?” asks the irritated helper. “I'd never find anything over there," the intoxicated man replies, "it's way too dark!”
We can wonder if this is the attitude of most researchers, who have spent much time and energy searching and re-searching for solutions to muscle inhibition where they ain’t. Any treatment that we have mentioned on this site has not been considered by these researchers.
In medical journals, muscle inhibition or weakness is somewhat well-referenced, but the mechanisms that cause and sustain it remain a mystery. Muscle inhibition has been studied since the 1900s and it is now known as “arthrogenic” (joint-caused) muscle inhibition, [1] a condition of muscle weakness found after injuries and surgeries to joints. Muscle weakness is also associated with emotional [2] and organ [3] stress by other researchers, but none of these researchers seems to have taken into account the others.
Muscle weakness is included as one of the causes of named conditions like ankle instability, [4, 5] whiplash, [6, 7] tennis elbow, [8] runner’s knee, [9, 10] plantar fascitis [11] and iliotibial band syndrome. [12, 13] It is also listed as a cause of falls in the elderly. [14] Muscle weakness also predisposes affected areas to injury, and is a known contributor to osteoarthritis, [15–24] Over the long term then, it can be not just painful, but crippling.
In the research literature, inhibited muscles are stated to be “rehabilitation resistant”, [25] unresponsive even to “intensive” [26] or “aggressive” [4] physical therapy treatments. Moreover, they will not strengthen even with dedicated exercise. [27]
Treatments that block signals from emerging from involved joints like TENS, local anesthetic, and cryotherapy (cold applications) will restore strength, but those results are temporary. [27–31]
In other words, the research says muscle inhibition is an incurable condition, but we know better!
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Bibliography
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