Chronic pain and slow-healing injuries can significantly impact mobility and quality of life. While traditional treatments like physical therapy and medication may help, they don’t always provide lasting relief. Non-invasive shockwave therapy, also called Extracorporeal Pulse Activation Technology or EPAT, offers an advanced solution to stimulate the body’s natural healing response. By reducing pain at the source, shockwave therapy is becoming the go-to option for treating stubborn conditions like tendinopathies, plantar fasciitis, and stress fractures that do not respond to conventional treatments. This article explores EPAT, how it works, its benefits, and the different conditions it has been successfully used to treat.
Shockwave therapy, or Extracorporeal Pulse Activation Technology (EPAT), is a non-invasive treatment that uses high-energy soundwaves to relieve pain by stimulating the body’s natural healing process. It’s a regenerative medicine now widely used to treat tendinopathies, break up calcium deposits, and treat ligament injuries that are difficult to heal.
It’s also frequently used to promote healing after orthopedic surgeries, particularly in cases where there are damaged tendons and ligaments. For instance, when surgically correcting a hip impingement, the surrounding tendons often remain painful after years of overworking and degeneration. Using EPAT after surgery helps those tendons heal, reducing post-surgical pain, improving mobility, and speeding recovery times compared to not using it.
EPAT is administered by a clinician holding a handheld device next to the skin. The device sends high-energy acoustic waves into the injured tissues. This enhances blood flow in the injured tissues while also stimulating the release of growth factors in the area, stimulating the cells responsible for generating new bone and connective tissues. Together, these impacts help promote healing at the cellular level and reduce recovery times. While these effects will help relieve pain, when the waves enter the tissues, they also overstimulate the nerve endings in the affected area, further reducing pain.
There are two different types of therapies used, and patients may receive one or the other, and sometimes both are used on the same patient due to their different effects.
Radial shockwave therapy uses a handheld device whose maximum intensity is at the device's tip in contact with the skin. The radial waves spread out in all directions away from the tip. As the radial waves spread wider and deeper, their intensity decreases. This makes it helpful in treating a broad and shallow area, such as along the length of an injured tendon.
Focused shockwave therapy also uses a handheld device, but in this case, the acoustic waves are focused through a cone-shaped arrangement of piezoelectric crystals. This concentrates them so that their maximum intensity is deep in the tissues rather than at the surface. It allows them to penetrate much deeper into the body and be used for targeting precise locations, enabling them to promote healing in deeper tissues at the site of injury.
There are numerous benefits of shockwave therapy. Here are some of the primary ones.
No invasive surgery is required since it’s applied to the skin's surface. This means you can perform treatments and have your patients immediately resume their normal activities without any recovery time needed from the procedure. It’s also a far less expensive alternative to surgeries, which many people can’t afford.
Shockwave therapy works well with other treatment modalities, especially physical therapy programs, to help injured people recover faster, allowing them to return to work or play more quickly.
Things like plantar fasciitis and chronic tendinopathies can be very stubborn and painful conditions that take weeks to heal, which impact quality of life, sometimes severely so. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and physical therapy are the traditional treatments for this, and when they fail, steroid injections are sometimes given. Even still, healing can take a long time. However, stubborn conditions like plantar fasciitis and tendinopathies are some of the most common conditions successfully treated with shockwaves. Studies have found that it significantly reduced pain, improved functionality, and improved quality of life. In fact, some researchers suggest it might be the first choice for its effectiveness and safety, speeding recovery time and significantly reducing pain much faster than without.
Non-invasive shockwave therapy is revolutionizing pain management and injury recovery by promoting faster healing without surgery or downtime. Its ability to target both superficial and deep tissues enhances microcirculation and promotes the release of growth factors that stimulate healing at the cellular level. This makes it a highly effective treatment for musculoskeletal conditions, including stubborn conditions like plantar fasciitis and tendinopathies. If you're considering integrating a shockwave therapy system into your practice, contact the helpful staff at Maven Imaging to learn more about our high-quality equipment to help you deliver cutting-edge care.