To what degree does tactile stimulation affect muscle tone?
Hard to find the appropriate board for this, but I'm after an answer from a neuro-perspective.
A Naprapath once tested the tone of different muscles concluding that I was, quoting, (globally) "hypertonic". My question(s) specifically regards this test/assessment of tonicity that roughly went as follows:
Procedure:
Asking the patient to resist the practitioners force with some muscle, e.g. trying to force the patient's arm downwards while the patient is pushing it upwards.
Stimulating another muscle or part of the body (nociceptors/free nerve endings in the skin above/around some muscle or other part of the body) by gentle touch such as scratching; palming; flicking; and even snapping ones fingers above the skin (to "create sonic waves affecting nociceptors over a larger area");
Repeating step 1.
Example 1: Asking the patient to force the head forward (backward) into the practitioners hand, which pushes back to even out the force. Then gently flicking the patients nose upwards (downwards) and repeating the same task again. Possibly, the second time, the muscles would have a significantly (noticeable by this test) higher tone.
Example 2: Asking the patient to lie on her back, resist the practitioners force which pushes the right or left leg inwards (by pushing outwards); Then asking the patient to hold one hand (gently) on her chin, and then repeating the resisting of the same force. (If there had been some trauma to the chin, this had apparently shown in the muscle tone in a significant way.
The purpose is to see if the muscles can be made less tonic or relaxed (weaker) this way, by stimulation of nociceptors.
Loose explanation from the practitioner: "Stiffness of muscles are almost always caused by some trauma or damage to the body; I am trying to find the surface of your body where this damage is located (by gently touching it while asking you to resist my force to see if the tone of the muscle changes)". By 'tone' here, they seem to loosely mean that a high tone would imply that I can quickly "lock" my muscles and thus resist quickly, and my resisting is perceived as strong, while low would be the opposite. And in this part of the assessment it doesn't seem to matter what muscle they're testing the tone of, it would supposedly affect most muscles if I touched the right place.
Question(s):
Are there any neurological basis for a procedure like the one described above? i.e. How could such gentle touch of the skin affect muscle tone somewhere else in the body? (Perhaps if there's prior, healed, damage to the place of touch.) Would you refer to some explanations, and/or studies?
EDIT: No massaging or pressure point therapy is involved, the stimulations are mild (e.g. gently scraping a toothpick over the skin, or resting ones hand on the skin).
EDIT2 (Additional information): The methods of which this assessment/test is part of is apparently called P-DTR, and was founded by Jose Palomar Lever from Mexico. Not much seems to be publicly known about them however, and I cannot find anything published about these methods. I will post a separate question about this on a different forum and post links here. So, I want to stress, the main question here regards the neurological basis for such an assessment of muscle tone.
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I believe the procedure described is called either muscle energy technique (MET) or proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNT). More details are on Advantageceus.com (p. 229). Skin stimuli, like scratching or flicking, may be part of the mentioned techniques.
This article on International Journal of Osteopathic Medicine says that "MET application may reduce pro-inflammatory cytokines and desensitize peripheral nociceptors."
According to one PhD dissertation published by Durban University of Technology "Both superficial and deep somatic mechanoreceptos, proprioceptors and nociceptors are stimulated by [chiropractic] manipulation, which sends strong afferent segmental impulses to the spinal cord resulting in central pain transmission inhibition."
Studies:
Effect of Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation Stretch Techniques on Trained and Untrained Older Adults (ResearchGate, 2002): "PNF stretch techniques can be used to produce increases in knee-joint extension ROM in older adults."
The effect of muscle energy technique on hamstring extensibility: the mechanism of altered flexibility (ScienceDirect, 2003): "Muscle energy technique produced an immediate increase in passive knee extension."
The Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation Reduces Isometric Strength in Apparently Health Women Short Communication (ResearchGate, 2018): "30 seconds of stretching by PNF method is already enough to occasion sensibility decrease in muscular proprioceptors, tendinous and articular, as well as in nociceptors..."
Muscle energy technique for non?specific low?back pain (Cochrane, 2015): "low?quality evidence that MET is not effective for patients with lower back pain."
EDIT:
Christopher L (the OP) believes the procedure is called Proprioceptive Deep Tendon Reflex (P-DTR).
The inventor of the technique explains it in detail here. Two other doctors describe it in this document found on the inventor's home page.
The descriptions alone, even if they make sense, are not already an evidence. Scientific evidence about the effectiveness of treatment methods in neurology/orthopedy can come from placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials, but I haven't found even one. The search ""proprioceptive deep tendon reflex," using operators .gov or .edu, and the search in Google Scholar give no results.
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