Yesterday was my third treatment by a new doctor who has an "alternative" form of treatment for my knee pain problems that have plagued me for the past year. He does a treatment called IASTM (Instrument Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization) which is a classy acronym for pummeling the shit out of my legs and butt. For decency sake, i'm not going to post the gruesome pictures of my ass bruise, but basically Dr. Wenneker takes something like one of these:
And then does some of this to my leg--
The process is a lot like squeegeing out all of the scar tissue from the muscles and tendons. Let me tell you, it hurts. It hurts a lot. He is also big on something called 'dry needling' which basically sort of surprises your muscle into relaxing and becoming more flexible. The process involves taking an accupuncture needle and inserting it into the skin over a knot in the muscle, then you stab it in and out at various angles to trick the muscle into relaxing. That sounds a lot worse than it feels. Really almost no pain on that one until I watched them doing it and it was basically like watching a sewing machine needle disapear into my flesh. Weird.
At the end of the day, I really don't care how much the process hurts, as long as the results are there. So far, so good. I definitely feel improvement in my mobility, and the tightness and pain around my hip have diminished a lot (except where I got jabbed with the corisone shot yesterday) and I'm hopeful that with some extra strengthening and stretching, I'll actually be able to keep the gains and start riding more. Fingers crossed.
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