Today we’re going to talk about one of our most advanced and exciting back pain treatments, laser therapy. When this therapy is mentioned, often it can throw up a lot of questions or concern from the patient as understandably it sounds scary and straight out of a James Bond movie. However, the therapy couldn’t be farther from this description as it’s actually one of our most soothing and powerful treatments that patients enjoy. So what is laser therapy doing? Fundamentally, it’s increasing circulation in the area of the body you’re using it on, improving the circulation into and around the area which increases the cell energy, the rate at which the material moves – reinvigorating it to start development of new blood vessels. This helps reduce the amount of pain a patient feels as it increases the through-flow of blood and nutrients.
As a result, more materials to repair the injury can be essentially ‘dropped off’ at the area, and waste products such as damaged cells and the inflammatory products can be effectively taken away. This drastically increases recovery speed, and is a unique effect to the laser therapy that is something a physiotherapist, osteopath or chiropractor using their hands to manually manipulate an area can achieve. The treatment helps to speed up the healing, and heal the area more completely without scar tissue. Using a good laser, like the one we have here at the clinic which is arguably the best on the market, it uses a number of wavelengths to target different biochemical and biomechanical processes and penetrate quite deeply into the body to the point of injury.
When Laser Can Be Helpful
One of the things we hear commonly from patients is that they’ve really struggled to find an effective treatment for their back pain, whether it’s been a postural issue or disc problem. We’ve even heard cases where a practitioner has simply touched their spine and could ‘feel a disc bulge’. As much as this would be a convenient method of diagnosis, it’s simply not at all accurate even in individuals of very, very low body fat where the spine is visible. It’s not possible to touch the disc bulge and tell from there that it’s bulged, slipped or herniated, and if you’ve ever seen how a disc bulge appears on an MRI you’ll know that method of diagnosis is not accurate. The discs even when bulged are quite deep into the spine, and if it was possible to feel it then it would have travelled through muscle tissue and would be floating in your body – it’s not physically possible.
How Does Laser Therapy Work?
Unlike any other treatment, laser therapy is able to penetrate deep enough into the tissues to actually have an effect at the level of the injury. There’s a lot of impressive work done with lasers superficially on the skin with conditions like burns or ulcers, where you can actually see the healing process that the laser provokes first hand in before and after photographs through medical trials. The treatment is often confused with surgical lasers, which are a completely different treatment. The fundamental mechanics of surgical lasers and ones you would see in James Bond or Star Wars movies, the premise is that they cut things. Therapeutic lasers, including the one we have here, are very different. It uses light therapy to penetrate into the tissues in a completely painless way, all you’re likely to feel is warmth around the area which can feel quite soothing and is often why patients use heat on an injury because it can feel nice. The laser effectively reduces the levels of inflammation and speed up the levels of tissue healing, which is the reason why we would close laser therapy as a treatment modality for back pain.
Why Laser Is Effective For Back Pain
When a patient has a very acute case of back pain, it’s causing them a lot of pain and they may not necessarily be able to move so well. So moving the patient around and having them complete exercises or stretches at this stage is not feasible, helpful or comfortable for the patient. The treatments we do hear are very helpful to those types of cases as they require little manoeuvring to get a patient into a position to do treatment. Laser therapy is certainly the easiest that we have, as it can be popped straight onto the back at the target area and get right into the tissues without the patient needing to move – there are a few tricks that we do here that make the treatment more effective and more pleasant for the patient as well, which we have developed over time to target the types of conditions we see time and time again here at the clinic more effectively. The bottom line with laser therapy though, is that it’s very non-invasive and comfortable that forms a vital pillar of The Mayfair Method to treat any kind of back problem or issue.
Contact Us Below
If you’d like to read more on how the laser therapy works, visit our website here for a full page of how it works and the nine ways laser therapy can help your pain. We hope you found this article helpful, if you have any questions do feel free to get in touch and we can answer those for you! Either email us at info@themayfairclinic.com, submit one of our contact forms online or find us on social media. We upload new articles every Monday, and new videos to our YouTube channel every Monday and Thursday. If you liked this article, or you know someone suffering with back pain, share the article with them by hitting the share options below. If you’d like to book in an appointment with us, you can call us on 0203 947 3222 or email us.
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