When an injury occurs involving soft tissue (non-bone), your body lays down scar tissue to protect and stabilize the injury. This is similar to when calluses form on a workman’s hand. At first, the skin on his hands is soft and flexible, but after repetitive injury to the skin while working with picks and shovels, the skin on the hands cracks, bleeds, and then forms a callus. This callus is scar tissue; it is a protective barrier, but its type of tissue is tight, coarse, and hard. It has lost its flexibility and suppleness. These are the exact same changes that can happen to other areas of soft tissue that are exposed to repeated injury. Someone who is a typist, for example, causes small but repeated injury to the muscles of the wrists and forearms day after day. Over time, this injury causes callus formation in these muscles and causes them to be tight, short, hard, and weak. This tightness can squeeze a nerve and cause pain and numbness to travel down a person’s arm, resulting in carpal tunnel syndrome.

This is just one example of a bodily injury that can take place anywhere in a body exposed to repeated injury: elbows, shoulders, neck, back, knees and feet. Accredited ART providers use their hands to break up this scar tissue, allowing it to be reabsorbed, thereby freeing the tissue and fixing the condition. The traditional approach of using anti-inflammatory drugs and prescription pain killers comes with a myriad of side effects and dangers. Also, while on their own, massage, heat, stretching, and exercise are useful, the benefits are only temporary. However, when in Chandler Pain Clinic’s care, our Chiropractic and Active Release Techniques, offer a more permanent and natural solution.

ART treatment can sting but is always done within the tolerance of the patient. The correction can be instant or take several treatments depending on many factors: the severity of the condition, how many problems are involved in condition, how old the injury is, the health and age of the patient, and history of surgery.

Examples of conditions treated by ART:

• Whiplash and neck injuries
• Carpal tunnel syndrome
• De Quervains’s syndrome
• Golfer and tennis elbow
• Rotator cuff injury
• Frozen shoulder
• Spinal pain, stiffness and weakness
• Hip and Buttock pain
• Chronic muscle strains tendentious
• Runner’s knee and foot plantar fascitis
• Hand, Wrist, Elbow and Shoulder problems
• Headaches, both tension and chronic migraine
• TMJ jaw disorders, clicking, tightness or pain.