If you’ve ever struggled with a sports injury or dealt with an ache that just wouldn’t mend, your body might have benefited from extra help during the healing process. Shockwave Therapy near me can offer such help, jump-starting the body’s ability to regenerate new tissue. It also decreases your pain by directly stimulating your nerves at the site of the injury. Though the name of the treatment makes it sound painful, it’s only mildly uncomfortable for most people.
It’s often prescribed as a treatment for patients who have sports injuries like a golfer’s elbow, tennis elbow, or pulled hamstring. It’s also administered to patients who experience pain in their soft tissues, such as that caused by plantar fasciitis — a painful condition that affects the heels of the feet.
Extracorporeal Shockwave Therapy is a new application of a treatment modality that has been around for decades: lithotripsy. The machine, developed over 7 years, allowed a patient to avoid surgical removal of kidney stones by focusing acoustic waves on the stones, breaking them into smaller pieces so they could be passed naturally.
Focused Extracorporeal Shockwave Therapy (fESWT)
Lithotripsy is a form of focused extracorporeal shockwave therapy. Focused shockwaves can be made by either reflecting waves so they converge on a single point, or by creating multiple waves that travel to a single point.The purpose of focused shockwaves is to create a wave of large amplitude, thus having a large effect deep within the body at a very specific site.3 This is why lithotripsy only breaks up kidney stones and not the cells that the shockwaves pass through.
Radial Extracorporeal Shockwave Therapy (rESWT)
Radial Shockwave Therapy near mehas a single source of acoustic waves. These are typically generated by a projectile traveling down a tube and hitting a metal plate, the applicator or emitter, which is pressed against a patient’s skin.3 This impact causes a wave that propagates through tissue away from the applicator in every direction possible, much like the ripples in water that move away from a stone thrown into a lake.
Unlike focused shockwave, the deeper into the body the radial shockwavetravels, the less energy it has.
Shockwave Therapy Used in Physiotherapy
Radial shockwave therapy is currently used by physiotherapists to treat chronic injuries in conjunction with a comprehensive treatment plan consisting of strengthening, neuromuscular control, stretching that is individually tailored for return to sport or activity.
Radial shockwaves assist in the treatment of chronic tendinopathy (tendon injury) such as tennis elbow or jumpers knee by stimulating new blood vessel formation for improved nutrition to tissue and new collagen production used as the building blocks for new tissue.
Shockwave is not a stand-alone treatment. Proper physiotherapy care involves identifying the reasons for a patient’s tennis elbow, calcification or other conditions and treating the cause to reduce the chance of reinjury or recurrence. Typical shockwave treatment consists of 3 to 5 shockwave sessions approximately one week apart, followed by physiotherapy sessions to treat the cause of injury by retraining body mechanics, building strength and balance, stretching and ensuring safe return to sport or activity.
How Does Shockwave Therapy Work?
Shockwave Therapy near me was developed in Germany during the late 1960s. Researchers began studying the effects of shockwaves on the human body and discovered that they affected different parts of the body in different ways: For example, electricity had little effect on fat but proved dangerous to the brain and the lungs. At this point, it was mostly used to break up painful kidney stones to make them easier for patients to pass.
Sign in to leave a comment.