Muscle pain has confused physicians for centuries. Muscles account for half the weight of your body but they are strangely absent from the examination and treatment that you generally get from your doctors.  There are many reasons for this, including: 
1.    Physicians don't agree on what to call muscle pain,
2.    They don't teach about muscles in medical school,
3.    We don't have a standardized examination for muscle pain, and
4.    We don't have a standard treatment plan for muscle pain.
These days, painful muscles are generally diagnosed as Myofascial Pain Syndrome which, by definition, suggests to most physicians that the pain is coming from painful nodules, called Trigger Points, in the muscle. This results in ignoring other important causes of muscle pain such as tension (when you are stressed), weakness, stiffness and muscle spasm. Assuming the pain is always from Trigger Points leads to mistakenly and unsuccessfully treating these misdiagnosed muscles.
 
Furthermore, where  you feel your pain may not necessarily be the muscle that is actually causing your pain.  For example pain you feel in your low back may originate in a muscle in your buttock. If you don’t treat the muscle that is causing the pain you only get partially (if any) better and only for a brief period.  If you inject the correct area, the pain can be eliminated permanently.
 
Finding the correct area is not easy. The way doctors do it now is by pressing, usually referred to as manual palpation, on the suspected muscle to see if it is painful to pressure. The problem with this method is that it is examining a muscle at rest, and when you have muscle pain it is usually when you are moving. Pain from pressure is a different mechanism than pain from a muscle when it is contracted.
 
In order to move a muscle and see if it is painful, I developed an instrument with the cooperation of the Stevens Institute of Technology that can move one muscle at a time and find which muscle in a region of the body is the cause of your pain. It is called the Muscle Pain Detection Device (MPDD). It works by actually contracting one muscle at a time which causes the muscle to pull on its attachments, where the nerves that transmit pain signals are concentrated, and also deforming small painful areas in the muscle belly as well. This recreates what happens to you when you have pain with movement. By stimulating the muscle in this way we can more accurately identify which muscle causes your pain
 

February 19, 2010 - 1:00am — Posted by Dr. Norman Marcus