04/24/2026
A FEW WORDS ABOUT TRIGGER POINTS
Many massage therapists treat the theory they learned in college as gospel — unquestionable, final, and beyond doubt. That's not quite the case. Many principles of modern massage theory are debatable, and some don't hold up to scrutiny at all.
Take trigger points. There's an enormous body of material on their diagnosis and treatment, where they often take center stage in explaining pain. The typical story goes like this: a skilled massage therapist eliminates in two minutes the pain a patient has lived with for ten years — pain that specialists of every stripe failed to touch. And remarkably, many people believe these stories. Including massage therapists themselves. And even physicians.
But let's go back to the source. Trigger point discussions invariably reference the books of Travell and Simons — dense, complex works that require a solid foundation in physiology and medicine to follow. Most massage therapists don't have that background and understandably get lost in the material.
On closer inspection, however, all that complexity turns out to be largely a retelling of standard medical physiology textbooks, in which trigger points do not feature at all. The theory lives in one place, the trigger points in another, connected by a couple of thin threads. In practice, all that theory mostly adds bulk and lends the books an air of serious scientific authority.
This was neatly illustrated by Steven Jurch (MA, ATC, LMT) of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston in his book Clinical Massage Therapy: Assessment And Treatment Of Orthopedic Conditions (2009). Jurch is a true believer — someone who places trigger points at the center of the pathogenesis of many musculoskeletal conditions — so accusing him of bias would be a stretch. And yet, after several decades of studying the subject, here is what he wrote:
"What happens to the muscle to cause a trigger point? Unfortunately, there is no gold standard for the pathology behind trigger points. The current etiology is known as the integrated hypothesis (Simons, 2004) because it combines two widely accepted theories."
In other words, plain and simple: after decades of research, mountains of books, and countless case studies, there is no scientific foundation for trigger points. The whole thing rests on a couple of unproven assumptions. That's it.
more articles in my blog:
Multiple Conditions in Massage Therapy March 27, 2026 by Andrew A massage therapist should always keep in mind the possibility of several independent conditions occurring in the same area of the body. To make this clearer, let’s look at an example. A client comes to your clinic complaining of pain...
