As a healthcare practitioner, it’s likely you rarely have a day without a soft tissue injury treatment.
Patients can injure their muscles, tendons, and ligaments either at work or by exercising. Sprains and strains are the most common workplace injuries—every day about 25,000 labourers sprain an ankle. And in football, for instance, sprains and strains account for 40 per cent of all injuries.
Depending on the level of severity, soft tissue injury treatment can last weeks to months. Conservative treatment involves the RICE protocol (rest, ice, compression, and elevation), which can be supplemented with physiotherapy as well as braces, walking boots, or other aids. A severe grade 3 sprain may require surgery.
Shockwave Therapy
Shockwave therapy is a clinically proven modality for soft tissue injury treatment. By targeting an affected area with acoustic sound waves, shockwave therapy increases metabolism and circulation, stimulating the body’s cells that are responsible for healing injured tissue and bone. As such, it can treat injuries without the need for surgery or drugs.
Sports medicine practitioners at the Mayo Clinic are using shockwave therapy for soft injury treatments in the following areas:
- Rotator cuff
- Lateral epicondyle
- Greater trochanter
- Proximal hamstring origin
- Rectus femoris
- Distal quadricep
- Patellar tendon
- Posterior tibial
- Peroneal
- Achilles
- Plantar fascia
Not just limited to sports medicine, shockwave therapy can be used by healthcare professionals in all fields dealing with soft tissue injuries.
Chronic and Acute Soft Tissue Injury Treatment
Nonhealing soft tissue injuries are very frustrating for patients. In many cases, they haven’t responded to conservative treatments but aren’t ready to consider surgery. Shockwave therapy is ideal in such situations.
A systematic review and meta-analysis published in the International Wound Journal compared the efficacy of shockwave therapy to conventional wound therapy for acute and chronic soft tissue injury treatment. The study included 10 randomized controlled trials involving 473 patients.
Researchers noted that shockwave therapy increased the healing rate nearly threefold and improved wound-healing area percentage by over 30 per cent. Shockwave therapy reduced the wound-healing time by three days for acute soft tissue injuries and 19 days for chronic soft tissue injuries. It also reduced the risk of wound infection by over half.
Shockwave Therapy for Soft Tissue Injury Treatment
If you want to leverage shockwave therapy in your practice then you’ve come to the right place. Shockwave Canada is the exclusive national distributor for industry-leading Storz shockwave devices.
In addition to having the most advanced therapeutic technology, MASTERPULS® shockwave therapy machines are ergonomically designed, so you can use or devices for hours without worrying about undue stress on your body.
To learn more about shockwave therapy, call 1 (888) 741-SHOC(7462) or visit our website.