Autonomic Recalibration Approach to Myofascial Pain Elimination

Myofascial pain contributes to opioid misuse and opioid use disorder. Alternative non-drug therapies for myofascial pain, such as osteopathic manipulative treatment, are critical areas of research. An unexplored approach in osteopathic manipulative treatment is recruiting the regulatory assistance of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) to alleviate myofascial pain. Autonomic Recalibration Technique (ART) is a manual and behavioral approach that employs osteopathic principles in addressing the neurobiological mechanisms that regulate myofascial pain. Our central hypothesis is that ART utilizes ANS regulation to restore myofascial function and alleviate chronic myofascial pain. The scientific premise of this proposal is the need to document mechanistic evidence that the ANS can be recruited to alleviate and eliminate pain by employing osteopathic principles. While elements of this approach have been employed by various practitioners, including manual and integrative clinicians including osteopaths, the innovation is to combine a manual bottom-up approach to shut down sympathetic tone, and a top-down approach to address trauma-based triggers that propagate pain. If successful, these preclinical data will be used in future grants to propose a clinical trial of ART as an additional technique in osteopathic manipulative treatment to provide an alternative to surgical or drug treatment of chronic myofascial pain.