An advantage to ultrasound treatment is the increased healing towards certain soft tissue injuries. By applying ultrasonic waves, it encourages more blood to flow to the injured area, bringing fresh oxygen and leading to the reduction of toxins and waste material.
How does ultrasound therapy work for injuries?
Feb 29, 2012 · Sprains and ligament injuries. Joint contracture or tightness. Generally speaking, any soft-tissue injury in the body may be a candidate for ultrasound therapy. For example, your physical therapist may use ultrasound for low back pain, neck pain, rotator cuff tears, knee meniscus tears, or ankle sprains.
Can ultrasound be used in physical therapy?
Mar 18, 2022 · One of the greatest proposed benefits of ultrasound therapy is that it is thought to reduce the healing time of certain soft tissue injuries. Ultrasound is thought to accelerate the normal resolution time of the inflammatory process by …
Can therapeutic ultrasound improve soft tissue recovery?
Apr 01, 2012 · Therapeutic ultrasound is a treatment that has been used in physical therapy clinics for over 50 years. It provides heat to injured body parts that lie deep within your body that cannot be heated with a standard hot pack alone. Ultrasound is also thought to improve cellular function by making microscopic gas bubbles near your injury expand and contract rapidly, a …
Is it safe to have an ultrasound after an injury?
This increased blood flow causes an increase in oxygen and chemicals that are essential for healing of the damaged tissue. As well as increasing blood flow, ultrasound has the additional effect of speeding up the transport of chemicals from the blood into the damaged tissue to aid the healing of the tissue.
How does ultrasound help with injuries?
“The deep heat generated by ultrasound can relax tense or strained muscles, minimizing muscle spasms and shortened muscles often associated with tension or injury.” Ultrasound therapy, along with range of motion exercises, can increase range of motion and help conditions such as osteoarthritis and phantom limb pain.Nov 20, 2018
Does ultrasound promote healing?
Promote Tissue Healing – Ultrasound not only improves your muscles and joint range of motion, but can aid in the healing of wounded tissues. The metabolism of the cells in the tissue are affected by ultrasound. The vibration produced by the ultrasound can help prevent scar tissue from forming.
Does ultrasound help heal tendons?
There is strong supporting evidence from animal studies about the positive effects of ultrasound on tendon healing. In vitro studies have also demonstrated that ultrasound can stimulate cell migration, proliferation, and collagen synthesis of tendon cells that may benefit tendon healing.
Does ultrasound help a ligament tear?
Background: Ruptured medial collateral ligaments are capable of healing over time, but biomechanical and biochemical properties remain inferior to normal tissue. Low-intensity ultrasound may improve healing. Hypothesis: Medial collateral ligaments treated with ultrasound will demonstrate superior healing.
How Does Ultrasound Work?
Inside your PT's ultrasound unit is a small crystal. When an electrical charge is applied to this crystal, it vibrates rapidly, creating piezoelect...
How Is Ultrasound applied?
Ultrasound is performed with a machine that has an ultrasound transducer (sound head). A small amount of gel is applied to the particular body part...
Contraindications to Using Ultrasound
There are some instances where you should not use ultrasound at all. These contraindications to ultrasound may include: 1. Over open wounds 2. Over...
What Does Ultrasound Feel like?
While you are receiving an ultrasound treatment, you will most likely not feel anything happening, except perhaps a slight warming sensation or tin...
Common Injuries Treated With Ultrasound
Usually, orthopedic injuries are treated with ultrasound. These may include: 1. Bursitis 2. Tendonitis 3. Muscle strains and tears 4. Frozen should...
Caution During Ultrasound
If you are going to physical therapy and are getting an ultrasound, you should know that many studies have found that ultrasound offers little bene...
How does ultrasound help with tissue regeneration?
Ultrasound generates heat deep into the tissues, increases circulation and metabolism. This helps to encourage tissue repair, loosens the muscles and increases oxygen and other important substances to promote tissue regeneration and healing. The heat created by ultrasound can also help increase flexibility.
Why does ultrasound hurt?
If the ultrasound is stopped when the pain is first felt, tissue damage is avoided and no harm is done.
What are the limitations of ultrasound?
As a passive therapy, ultrasound is considered low-risk, but it does have limitations and should not be used on: 1 Young children 2 Pregnant women (chest, abdomen, or back) 3 Open wounds 4 Heart (especially if you have a pacemaker) 5 Reproductive organs 6 Cancerous areas 7 Areas with decreased sensation
Why is inflammation important after an injury?
Inflammation is an important part of the initial healing process as it boosts the body’s immune response and promotes tissue regeneration. However, it can lead to excessive swelling, which restricts blood flow and causes the joints to stiffen.
What is the purpose of ultrasound?
Medical or diagnostic ultrasound is used to generate images of the internal structure of the body. It uses a transducer to send and then pick up the high-frequency sound waves as they bounce off the area where the ultrasound is applied.
How does ultrasound help with scar tissue?
Ultrasound helps by using high-frequency sound waves to break the fibres of the scar tissue down into smaller fragments.
Is ultrasound safe for children?
As a passive therapy, ultrasound is considered low-risk, but it does have limitations and should not be used on: Young children. Pregnant women (chest, abdomen, or back) Open wounds. Heart (especially if you have a pacemaker) Reproductive organs. Cancerous areas. Areas with decreased sensation.
How does ultrasound affect healing?
In most cases, this cannot be felt by the patient themselves. This increase in temperature may cause an increase in the extensibility of structures such as ligaments, tendons, scar tissue, and fibrous joint capsules. In addition, heating may also help to reduce pain and muscle spasm and promote the healing process.
What is ultrasound therapy?
Ultrasound Therapy. Ultrasound therapy has been used as an electrotherapy treatment modality by therapists over the last 50 years.It involves passing high frequency sound waves into soft tissue.
Why is ultrasound therapy important?
One of the greatest proposed benefits of ultrasound therapy is that it is thought to reduce the healing time of certain soft tissue injuries. Ultrasound is thought to accelerate the normal resolution time of the inflammatory process by attracting more mast cells to the site of injury.
How are ultrasound waves produced?
Ultrasonic waves or sound waves of a high frequency that is not audible to the human ear are produced by means of mechanical vibration in the metal treatment head of the ultrasound machine. The treatment head is then moved over the surface of the skin in the region of the injury transmitting the energy into the tissues.
Does ultrasound help with scar tissue?
Hence ultrasound may accelerate the proliferative phase of tissue healing. It is thought to improve the extensibility of mature collagen and so can have a positive effect on fibrous scar tissue which may form after an injury.
Can ultrasound affect tissue repair?
As ultrasound is thought to affect the tissue repair process and so it is also highly possible that it may affect diseased tissue in an abnormal fashion. In addition, the proposed increase in blood may also function in spreading malignancies around the body.
Why use lower frequency?
Simply speaking lower frequency application provides a greater depth of penetration and so is used in cases where the injured tissue is suspected to be deeply situated. Conversely, higher frequency doses are used for structures that are closer to the surface of the skin.
What is therapeutic ultrasound?
Bottom Line. Therapeutic ultrasound is a treatment modality often used in physical therapy. It has been used historically to improve circulation and tissue healing, but research has called into question its efficacy.
How does ultrasound work?
How Ultrasound Works. Therapeutic ultrasound is a treatment that has been used in physical therapy clinics for over 50 years. It provides heat to injured body parts that lie deep within your body that cannot be heated with a standard hot pack alone . Ultrasound is also thought to improve cellular function by making microscopic gas bubbles ...
What is the placebo effect?
The placebo effect is a phenomenon where you perceive an improvement in your condition simply because something is being done to you. Your physical therapist tells you that ultrasound treatments can make you better, and therefore you start to feel better after receiving the treatments. 2 .
Is ultrasound good for healing?
Studies about using ultrasound to help speed healing are not so positive. There are many studies that compare ultrasound use to sham (fake) ultrasound. These studies indicate that people who receive an ultrasound for an injury do not have a speedier, healthier recovery or a better outcome.
Is ultrasound good for shoulder pain?
There is one positive study on the use of ultrasound in the treatment of shoulder pain. A 2001 review of studies for treatments for shoulder pain gave ultrasound a grade of “A” (benefit demonstrated) for the use of ultrasound in the treatment of one specific shoulder condition.
Is ultrasound a treatment modality?
Ultrasound may be a treatment modality that you are exposed to during your physical therapy treatments. Research calls into question its efficacy, so if your PT does use it, be sure to understand the goals of treatment and the necessity of the treatment.
Does ultrasound heat your body?
Heating Effects of Ultrasound. A published overview of therapeutic applications of ultrasound confirms that it certainly does heat your body parts when applied correctly. It also heats parts of your body that are deep and located outside of the reach of standard hot packs.
What is ultrasound used for?
It can also be used to inject drugs into tissues ( phonophoresis ), or to violently vibrate the tip of an invasive probe ( lithotripsy, usually used for gall stones).
What is ESWT ultrasound?
Many concerns about the widespread usage of therapeutic ultrasound, especially extracorporeal shockwave therapy ( ESWT) Ultrasound therapy ( US) is the use of sound waves above the range of human hearing 1 2 to treat injuries like muscle strains or runner’s knee.
What are trigger points in muscle tissue?
Quick muscle knot orientation: So-called “muscle knots” — AKA trigger points — are small unexplained sore spots in muscle tissue associated with stiffness and soreness. No one doubts that they are there, but they are unexplained and controversial. They can be surprisingly intense, cause pain in confusing patterns, and they grow like weeds around other painful problems and injuries, but most healthcare professionals know little about them, so misdiagnosis is epidemic. For more information about how trigger points might be involved in your own medical history, see PainScience.com’s best-selling tutorial:
Is ultrasound good for medicine?
Almost everyone seems to assume that ultrasound is proven — good technological medicine — but that just doesn’t seem to be the case. There’s a whole family of “stim” therapies based on the hope that biology will work better if it’s energetically stimulated: by electricity, by laser light, by far infrared radiation.
How does Ultrasound work?
When tissue is exposed to ultrasound, the sound waves cause a micro-vibration within the tissue. This vibration creates heat energy that increases blood flow to the area. This increased blood flow causes an increase in oxygen and chemicals that are essential for healing of the damaged tissue.
What Should I Expect?
The body area being treated needs to be exposed and an aqueous gel is applied to the region. The ultrasound probe then stays in contact with the gel, gently massaging the area until the treatment time is over. A treatment session usually lasts between 5 and 10 minutes.
What injuries do we use ultrasound for?
Ultrasound is most effective when used for soft tissue injuries including:
Will It Hurt?
Ultrasound therapy shouldn’t hurt. If anything it feels soothing as the probe massages over the area being treated.
How Many Sessions Will I Need And How Much Will It Cost?
Ultrasound is usually used as part of a range of treatments rather than as a standalone treatment. For example with Achilles tendinitis, the tendon might be massaged and stretched before ultrasound is applied. The number of sessions needed will be specific to the injury being treated.
How does ultrasound help with pain?
Ultrasound wave vibrations increase tissue temperature and circulation, helping to alleviate pain. During ultrasound therapy, deep heating provides a warming sensation to afflicted areas. Deep heating tissue also aids in releasing tension in tight muscles and tendons.
What is ultrasound therapy?
Ultrasound therapy, also known as therapeutic ultrasound, uses sound waves to treat musculoskeletal and other medical problems. Ultrasound is commonly used to treat inflammation, such as a sprain or tendinitis, after an injury.
Why do physical therapists use ultrasound?
Your physical therapist can utilize ultrasound to improve the stretch of tissue and help to sustain tensile forces. Therapeutic ultrasound soothes sore muscles, and boosts healing.
Is ultrasound therapy a thermal therapy?
Aside from deep heating, ultrasound therapy has non-thermal benefits as well. During ultrasound therapy, an ultrasound transducer helps flood the body with energy. This energy catalyzes an effect called cavitation, in which microscopic gas bubbles surrounding soft tissue expand and contract rapidly.
What is ultrasound equipment used for?
We utilize ultrasound equipment in a variety of fields, from ultrasonic detection in ships, to testing for flaws in airplanes. However, chances are you are most familiar with using ultrasound in the medical field.
Can you use ultrasound for chiropractic?
However, if you have received physical therapy in the past, you're most likely very accustomed to the use of ultrasound therapy as part of your chiropractic treatment.
What is therapeutic ultrasound?
Therapeutic ultrasound has been studied and used for the past seven decades to treat musculoskeletal injuries. Recently, a significant body of animal and human research has focused on the biomechanical effects of daily-applied, low intensity therapeutic ultrasound (LITUS) on soft tissue recovery. We performed a systematic review ...
What is a SAM device?
The SAM device is used to reduce inflammation and pain, and accelerate the healing of soft tissues such as tendons, ligaments, and muscles. Both Exogen and SAM are non-invasive prescription-use devices that are administered and monitored by a licensed medical professional.
When was ultrasound first used in physical therapy?
Physical Therapy. Unfocused beams of ultrasound for physical therapy were the first clinical application, dating to the 1950s , which often has been referred to simply as “therapeutic ultrasound” (Robertson and Baker, 2001). This modality now typically has a base unit for generating an electrical signal and a hand-held transducer.
What are the biological effects of ultrasound?
Other potential mechanisms for biological effects of ultrasound include the direct action of the compressional, tensile, and shear stresses. In addition, second-order phenomena, which depend on transmitted ultrasound energy, include radiation pressure, forces on particles and acoustic streaming.
What frequency is ultrasound used for?
Low power ultrasound of about 1 MHz fre quency has been widely applied since the 1950s for physical therapy in conditions such as tendinitis or bursitis.
What is ultrasonic energy used for?
The use of ultrasonic energy for therapy continues to expand, and approved applications now include uterine fibroid ablation, cataract removal (phacoemulsification), surgical tissue cutting and hemostasis, transdermal drug delivery, and bone fracture healing, among others.
What is ultrasound assisted liposuction?
Another procedure, ultrasound assisted liposuction, is widely used in cosmetic surgery for the purpose of removing excessive fat tissue (Mann et al. 2008). The mechanism of action apparently involves cavitational fat cell break up with removal of the fat emulsion by suction through the probe.
What is HIFU used for?
HIFU application in therapy and treatment of disease is one of the more active areas of research and development among all the non-ionizing-energy modalities such as radiofrequency, lasers, and microwaves. For example, HIFU is under investigation for therapeutic modulation of nerve conductance (Foley et al. 2008).
What are the benefits of ultrasound?
As well as heating and relaxing the muscles, ultrasound therapy breaks down scar tissue and increases local blood flow.
Why do people use ultrasound?
For the last 80 years, ultrasound therapy has been used as a non-invasive procedure to treat a wide variety of ailments. It is often used to treat swelling, particularly when the swelling is spread over a larger area than usual.
How long does ultrasound last?
In general, ultrasound therapy sessions will last no longer than 5 minutes.
What is lymph fluid?
Lymph is a clear fluid that carries white blood cells throughout our body, which fights infection, encourages healing, and removes excess fluid. These three factors combined make it a very effective way to treat swelling and inflammation, not only of the muscles, but also of the joints and ligaments.
Is ultrasound therapy safe for pregnant women?
Despite its similarity to ultrasound machines, ultrasound therapy is not suitable for issues located near the womb of a pregnant woman. The wavelengths used in this therapy are different to those used in a prenatal ultrasound, and could put the pregnancy at risk.
Overview
Availability
- Garden-variety therapeutic US is cheap and available everywhere. The machines are small, even portable: you can buy small handheld ones. Treatment is brief and painless, and applied (indiscriminately?) to almost any common musculoskeletal problem.
Treatment
- ESWT uses much stronger sound waves shock waves!7 (Radial shock wave therapy is a bit different.8) Treatment is painfully intense and painfully pricey.9
Advantages
- On the one hand, ESWT is just a more is better version of standard US, because it is often used with the same imprecise clinical intention to stimulate/provoke tissues. On the other hand, because it was originally developed for smashing gall stones, ESWT is strong enough to actually disrupt tissue, such as calcifications in tendons which is a nice precise clinical goal and a whole …
Research
- When I started studying for this article way back in the mid-2000s, I was quite surprised by how little there was to study. Back then, every scientific paper about US pointed out there is not enough research on this topic, or at least not enough good research and not much has changed. A 2015 review of ultrasound for rotator cuff tendinopathy (cited below) found only six trials, all po…
Criticism
- The disconnect between the popularity of US and the more or less total lack of informative research is troubling. A handful of good studies is a joke for a therapy that is worth literally billions of dollars in the marketplace. How can that much therapy be sold without a satisfactory body of evidence that it works? Bizarre! This is the ultimate example of pseudo-quackery: popular treatm…
Quotes
- This does not mean that US never works for anyone. It does mean that it has been prescribed and sold to patients for decades with unjustified confidence. And that is not cool. And so few patients are singing the virtues of standard US. It not only fails to generate testimonials, but actually generates many annoyed antimonials. Meanwhile, there is still just no basis for thinking that ultr…
Results
- Ultrasound is an unusually easy treatment to test scientifically.10 If it works reasonably well, then the results should be pretty clear. Just compare results in patients who received real ultrasound to patients who get a fake instead! And yet there are just a few dozen such experiments in the scientific literature, and most of them are seriously flawed. Conclusions from evidence reviews l…
Prognosis
- Standard therapeutic ultrasound probably does little or nothing for most people. A sliver of hope remains that some specific conditions will respond to ultrasound with just the right settings.
Marketing
- Not only that, but ultrasound has found new life in the marketplace as shockwave therapy faster, stronger waves, with a bigger price tag! Consider this marketing language from a Canadian company, Shockwave Institute, specializing in ESWT:
Status
- Things seem to have changed for the better, though 80-85% effective would still be a hard claim to defend.
Uses
- Bizarrely, ESWT is being used to treat conditions as unexpected as erectile dysfunction, stroke, and venous leg ulcers. Theres even some preliminary evidence for such uses though not all. But there are now multiple positive reviews of ESWT for its more common uses, like stubborn cases of plantar fasciitis, a painful irritation of the arch of the foot. A good 2016 example is Lou et al, w…
Symptoms
- Patients often express irritation with a common physical therapy business model: working with several patients at once, rotating between rooms or beds, often leaving patients with passive therapies (like a moist hot pack from a hydrocollator nice enough, but worth a steep fee?) Many patients often go a step further and complain specifically about ultrasound and TENS, skeptical …
Purpose
- The big idea is this will blow your mind! that cells and tissues respond well to being shaken (not stirred). In theory, ultrasound works by vibrating tissues back to health, which sounds like something youd hear on an infomercial, or the Dr. Oz Show. What, exactly, does vibration do to tissues? Does anyone actually understand it?
Future
- There is lots of interesting ultrasound biology to consider, and scientists may eventually nail down effects that might be the basis for new evidence-based therapies. For instance, a decade later, Tsai et al declared that There is strong supporting evidence from animal studies about the positive effects of ultrasound on tendon healing31 but animal studies are notoriously misleadin…
Example
- Another great example: the persistent hope that rattling cells with sonic vibrations might speed the healing of bone fractures, particularly low intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS). Such an effect, if proven, would certainly be a delightful bit of weird good news about biology. Unfortunately, it is probably dis-proven. In 2017, the British Medical Journal published an excellent review with a ver…
Society and culture
- Physical therapists often cite the gate control mechanism as a justification for US and ESWT (and some other popular treatments, especially TENS). This is nonsense and a great example of why patients should be cautious, especially with the expense of ESWT.
Applications
- The gate control mechanism is an important idea in pain science, proposed in 1965 by Dr. Ronald Melzack and Dr. Patrick Wall, and still accepted today as an explanation for a familiar phenomenon: the way we rub injured body parts for a little pain relief. The idea is that pain signals pass through a gate in the spinal column. The state of the gate is controlled by many factors. Ho…
Reviews
- Although it may be surprising in contrast to the generally unimpressive evidence of the effectiveness about therapeutic ultrasound, it nevertheless reinforces that ultrasound does indeed do some interesting things to tissues: its just not clear exactly what. An important caveat is that there is significant scientific debate about what trigger points really are.34 Some would say its h…