The way my Physical Therapist described the process is that muscles go into spasm as an automatic reaction to protect themselves and surrounding areas from movement when something is wrong in the area, such as nerve entrapment, arthritis, tendonitis, surgical injury, or other injury or disease process.

Muscles going into spasm for this reason is often a self destructive process. While muscle spasms prevent movement, they also prevent healing and may exacerbate the original problem. Much of physical therapy is to encourage muscles in spasm to relax, resulting in pain relief, increased blood flow and enervation, and healing of the cause of the spasm.

I’d like to see PT a usual part of most of our therapeutic program. Often medical intervention aims to only relieve symptoms using various combinations of drugs, with associated side effects. While pain relief is also the aim of PT, there is also an attempt to intervene in a non-drug way to promote healing. Twice in my life, PT made extreme pain tolerable and restored full function to injured areas of my body where my doctors offered nothing but narcotics.