For patients with chronic lower back pain, every day presents new challenges, and simple tasks can become impossible. We know that no matter the cause, the severity, or how long your patient has been suffering, your primary goal as their physician is to help relieve the pain and restore function to get them back to the highest quality of life possible.

This may involve a variety of treatments, including pain relievers, physiotherapy, exercise regimens, massage, chiropractic care, and more. Is shockwave therapy on your list? If it isn’t, it should be. It’s one of the fastest-growing non-invasive treatment methods for pain control in musculoskeletal disorders, including lower back pain.

During this type of treatment, a shockwave therapy device sends sound waves into the skin to target the injured area. This stimulates the body’s own healing process, helping relieve pain by:

  • Increasing blood flow to the affected area
  • Encouraging cell regeneration
  • Decreasing inflammation
  • Normalizing muscle tone
  • Breaking down scar tissue

Some of the best things about this type of therapy for your patients are that sessions are short and help provide successful relief and restore mobility painlessly. Most patients experience some relief immediately after the first session. Additionally, there is no recovery time. Your patients can head right out to their car and drive home (or back to work or play) directly after treatment. Plus, there are no side effects. 

Does Research Support the Use of Shockwave Therapy for Chronic Lower Back Pain? 

We can talk all day about the benefits and how well it works, but does the research support it? Yes, extensive research has been done on the efficacy of using shockwave therapy to address chronic lower back pain.

In a meta-analysis of 12 studies featuring 632 patients, Liu et al. (2023) found that shockwave therapy “provided better pain relief and improved lumbar dysfunction compared with the other interventions included, and no serious adverse effects were found.” Control group interventions included physical exercises, laser therapy, trigger point and/or muscle injections, oral medications, ultrasound and electrotherapy, and myofascial trigger therapy. This is highly significant, as all shockwave groups experienced greater pain relief than the control groups.

Whether you treat patients’ chronic lower back pain with shockwave therapy alone or include it in a combination plan featuring several other therapies, it’s undeniable that the pain management potential is significant.

Shockwave Canada offers a range of devices from industry-leading STORZ medical devices, a pioneer in the field for over 70 years. Call 1-866-267-4162 or visit www.shockwavecanada.com today.