Introducing the “Gamechanger“ - Myoreflextherapy

• Presentation of a new complementary therapeutic procedure for non-specific complaints following infectious diseases or in context of underlying rheumatological diseases. • Myoreflextherapy is a suitable procedure for complementary use in cases of long-lasting performance deficits such as post-acute COVID syndrome (PACS). • Myoreflextherapy is an outstanding and unique therapy concept that provides long-term benefits for the patients. This work explains for the first time on a scientific level the basic principles and underpins them with a summary of pre-described individual cases. Chronic pain conditions, mental illnesses and, more recently, post-COVID syndrome are still difficult to treat satisfactorily in many cases, despite rapid medical progress. New, highly individualised treatment approaches are required to alleviate and ideally even cure complaints that are relevant to everyday life. Myoreflex therapy is a new type of therapeutic procedure that has been developed since the early 1980s on the basis of various findings and sciences, but has so far only been sparsely described in the international literature. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the findings to date and to categorise the therapy within the current therapeutic landscape. For this purpose, a comprehensive literature search was conducted in MEDLINE/Pubmed, Google Scholar and the Cochrane database. In addition, the most important data from the basic works on the initial description of myoreflex therapy were extracted and summarised in condensed form. In this way, the significance of myoreflex therapy as a new, integrative and holistically orientated form of therapy can be demonstrated. It represents a neurophysiologically based further development of osteopathy, acupressure and concentrative movement therapy and utilises neuronal control circuits to additionally tense defined muscle groups in order to stimulate self-regulation and reduce pain. By combining various established therapeutic principles in this new method, chronic pain conditions, psychologically induced musculoskeletal changes and non-specific post-acute COVID symptoms can be treated much more effectively.