Electrotherapy

Electrotherapy is the use of electrical energy as a medical treatment. This can come in the form of ultrasound, laser therapy, shockwave, interferential treatment or TENS. These treatments have developed significantly over time and tend to move in trends.

In the 90’s, ultrasound was the go-to.
In the 2000’s, the trend moved to interferential and heat packs/

The current trend in the electrotherapy space is Shockwave treatment.

This treatment is very cool and very specific, with a hand held device delivering a shock of energy to the targeted area. The literature describes it working well at a set frequency (often 2-3x per week over 6-12 weeks) for a set of very specific conditions… That being said, the machine is about $40k and often requires a bump in the consultation price to cover the overhead of the machine… Additionally, literature often shows that targeted manual therapy and specific exercise is often more effective for the same conditions without the expenditure or need for lots of frequent physio treatment! So that’s what we prefer to do at City Physio!

Other electrotherapy modalities like nterferential or TENS machines which help only when they are on and deliver no lasting pain relief. And laser or other light-based treatments tend to have sketchy evidence bases and have not been proven better than placebo, and so dont meet the standard we require for interventions at City Physio.

That being said, we do currently have treatment Ultrasound at City Physio that we do use on rare occasions. Ultrasound uses ultrasonic pulses through the head of a handheld device to vibrate tissues and produce targeted heat. It can be used to help increase blood flow, stimulate healing and break down scar tissue and at specific settings can be used in boney healing or in the treatment of mastitis.
We most commonly use ultrasound for things like haematomas/ brusing and occasionally acute sprains and strains.

Overall, electrotherapy isn’t our recommendation and we will often recommend more in the direction of more efficacious and evidence based treatment such as targeted manual therapy, specific exercises and biomechanical corrections. If you would like to discuss more we would love to talk you through your treatment options in a consultation!