What is electrotherapy?
Electrical stimulation has a long history in humans. It was used in ancient Rome, 63 A.D, for pain control. Scribonius Largus reported that pain was relieved by standing on an electrical fish at the seashore. From the 16th to 18th centuries various electrostatic devices were used for headaches and other pains, even Benjamin Franklin was a supporter of this method for pain relief.
Nowadays electrotherapy is a broad term which is used for variety of machine with various goals of treatment; pain relief, reduce swelling and inflammation, reduce tissue adhesions, speed up tissue healing, muscle strengthening, tissue heating or cooling, and other effects targeting problem tissues whether nerve, tendons, ligaments, vascular and lymphatic system, joints and surrounding tissue.
For electrotherapy, we use
- BioEnergy Stimulation (BESt Microcurrent therapy)
- TECAR therapy
- LASER therapy
- Ultra-Sound
- Shock Wave therapy
- Multi-Mode Electrical stimulation
- Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation
- Electro-acupuncture
- LPG endermologie.
What can electrotherapy do for you?
Pain relief: Electrotherapy uses electrical signals to interfere with the transmission of neural pain signals into the brain, through what is called ‘ gate control’. It effectively slows down or distracts the ‘pain message’ from the nerve to the brain. From a physiotherapy point of view, affecting one’s ‘Pain Gate’, whether acute or chronic, is a crucial area of treatment. Electrotherapy is a very useful resource where conventional medicines are not as effective or person prefers not to take medicine and treat the problem in a more natural way. remove
Soft Tissue healing acceleration: The inflammation and repair after injury are not simple events. Tissue healing (or tissue repair) refers to the body’s replacement of destroyed tissue by living tissue through Regeneration and Repair. In Regeneration, specialized tissues are replaced by the proliferation of surrounding undamaged healthy specialized cells. In Repair, lost tissue is replaced by another type of tissue which matures to form scar tissue.
The healing process (Repair) stages are– Bleeding, Inflammation, new cell production and Remodeling (getting shaped).
The final outcome of these events is that the damaged tissue will be repaired with a scar which is not a ‘like for like’ replacement of the original, but enables quality recovery from injury, such as what happens you have a minor cut on your hand. In cases of inhibited healing response, delayed body reactions or repeated trauma, the healing process is compromised (slowed, stalled or in some way delayed ) and then, therapeutic intervention comes into effect. The example of this can be inflammation in the nerve caused by constant trauma on the spinal disc that responds to electrotherapy.
The majority of the patients that we see in the clinic are those for whom the normal repair sequence has been disturbed, has not happened or is in some way delayed.
Electrotherapy in physiotherapy facilitate or promote the normal tissue repair process, and thereby enhance the sequence of events in the tissue from injured to their ‘normal’ state. The best of the available research support this.