What You Need to Know About Shockwave Therapy

If you’re dealing with a sports injury that’s painful or slow to heal, our team at PRO Institute may recommend shockwave therapy as the most effective treatment.

Before you run screaming in the other direction, we’re not talking about electroshock therapy (that involves electricity, which we absolutely don’t recommend for sports injuries).

In fact, shockwave therapy is a form of regenerative medicine that helps your body heal itself. Here’s what you need to know about this treatment that may be exactly what you need!

What is shockwave therapy?

The idea behind shockwave therapy (also called extracorporeal shock wave therapy) is to jumpstart your body’s natural healing process to accelerate your recovery timeline. When you sustain an injury playing sports — a sprain, a fracture, etc. — your body automatically begins to heal, but the process can take longer than you want, especially if you’re trying to get back to competition. 

With shockwave therapy, Dr. Gayan Poovendran uses a small, handheld device similar to an ultrasound wand to deliver painless pulses of shockwave energy deep into the injured tissues. This focused therapy promotes natural healing by increasing circulation in and around the injured area, breaking down calcified deposits in the damaged tissues, and stimulating regeneration of bone, muscle, and connective tissue cells. It can also reduce pain by treating nerve endings in the area.

This focused therapy is more effective than the radial shock waves many offices use. They only reach a superficial level, while our hospital-grade equipment delivers powerful shock waves that reach the injured area.

A single treatment takes around 15 minutes. Dr. Poovendran will evaluate your situation to determine how many treatments you’ll need. We use shockwave therapy on patients who are 14 and older.

What are the benefits?

Shockwave therapy works well to treat injuries such as golf and tennis elbow, plantar fasciitis, calcific tendinitis, jumper’s knee, stress and nonhealing fractures, and many other musculoskeletal injuries. Our team will complete a physical exam, medical history, and imaging before recommending shockwave therapy.

It’s a noninvasive treatment that lets you live your life while you heal because you can avoid surgery and the lengthy recovery. Combined with other treatments such as physical therapy, it can help difficult cases heal more quickly, allowing you to get back to your normal life and your sport as soon as possible.

If you’re trying to recover from an injury that just won’t respond to traditional treatments, our team at PRO Institute is happy to discuss shockwave therapy. Just call our Davie, Florida, office at 305-209-1951 to schedule an appointment, or book your own time slot on our website!