Tag Archives: scar

Cold laser treatments provide pets with relief from painful symptoms of a variety of medical conditions and diseases. These treatments are non-invasive and painless. Recovery time is greatly reduced.

Both laser therapy and acupuncture are based on traditional Chinese medicine’s concept of chi, or energy. Ancient theories about how chi moves through the body mirror modern medicine’s understanding of how the nervous system functions in the body. Both acupuncture and laser therapy pinpoint specific spots along the body’s chi (or nervous system) where there are blockages, which obstruct the flow of energy or information throughout the body. Blockages hinder the body’s ability to function at an optimal level and heal at an accelerated rate.

Both acupuncture and laser therapy have been shown to increase circulation throughout the body, reducing inflammation, relieving pain, and accelerating healing. These therapies offer pain management and treatment for conditions like immune-related disorders, skin conditions, arthritis, and reproductive disorders.

Low level laser therapy is being successfully used treat pain or stiffness associated with arthritis and other degenerative joint conditions, acute injuries, and post-operative recovery for surgical patients. It has been found to be an excellent, well-tolerated alternative to drugs. This type of laser treatment is different from surgical lasers that cut. This wavelength of light penetrates the skin without cutting or burning it. It stimulates the cells and blood vessels that lie just beneath the skin. It does this without causing any harm to the tissues.

The laser’s contact with injured or diseased tissue promotes the production of ATP, a substance essential to cellular reproduction and repair. This enhances the body’s natural healing abilities. Laser therapy strengthens injured tissues, which makes them less vulnerable to re-injury during the recovery process. It also reduces internal scarring, another potential source of pain and stiffness. Painkilling drugs can only mask the symptoms — they don’t treat the underlying issues.

New Applications for Cold Laser Therapy

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Almost every day, there are new and exciting announcements on ways that low level laser therapy can help keep us and our animals healthy. The following is from Valerie C. Coffey, Science Writer:

It started with mouse hairs. In 1967, Dr. Endre Mester of Semmelweis Medical University in Budapest, Hungary, recognized that a low-power ruby laser could stimulate faster hair regrowth in mice. Since then, lasers have increasingly become an important instrument in the physician’s toolbox.

Today, research is advancing toward the use of lasers to diagnose and treat a plethora of conditions. Recent rapid technological developments in lasers have contributed to their safe and effective use in surgical settings, aesthetic treatments, ophthalmology, oncology, cardiology and many other biomedical applications, including veterinary settings.

Lasers’ efficiency, safety and precision are the drivers behind this growth. In surgical applications, medical lasers are more precise than conventional surgical scalpels, and therefore cause less damage to surrounding tissue. Although systems are expensive and operators of medical lasers require special training, the advantages of reduced pain, bleeding, swelling and scarring are compelling enough to justify their widespread adoption.

Much current cutting-edge research is focused on biophysical and physiological studies at the molecular and cellular level, and on lasers’ effects on whole organisms. A group at the University of Texas at Arlington, led by assistant professor of physics Dr. Samarendra Mohanty, has used low-power near-IR lasers and crystalline magnetic carbon nanoparticles (CNPs) to perform photothermal delivery of impermeable dyes and plasmids (self-replicating DNA molecules) into live human prostate cancer (PC3) cells (Scientific Reports, doi: 10.1038/srep05106). The noninvasive technique involves directing a CW Ti:sapphire laser at 800 nm toward the cancer cells in the presence of plasmids and CNPs measuring 5-10 nm. The heat causes the CNPs to stretch the cell membranes and increase fluid flow to allow exogenous substances (plasmids, for example, or an agent that kills the cancer) to be delivered.

Laser therapy is one of several emerging medical and veterinary techniques using high-intensity light to stimulate cellular function in tissue, or to shrink and destroy tumors and precancerous growths. Doctors can direct laser therapy on the surface of a body, or use it to reach where conventional surgical techniques can’t, via a flexible fiber optic endoscope inserted through the mouth, nose, colon or vagina.

Photodynamic therapy is another laser therapy approach that activates an applied photosensitive agent that kills only the cancer cells.

Recent medical research theorizes that the mechanism of low-level laser therapy is primarily via the absorption of light within mitochondria, the numerous “power plants” within cells that convert the oxygen and pyruvate from food into cellular energy via adenosine triphosphate (ATP). As it happens, cytochrome C oxidase, a critical protein involved in the regulation of mitochondrial activity, is a photoacceptor of light in the near- to far-IR. At the cellular level, LLLT displaces nitric oxide from the respiratory chain to increase levels of ATP and reactive oxygen species. The deep-tissue application of laser or LED devices in LLLT techniques may work via this mitochondrial mechanism to promote tissue repair, reduce inflammation and induce analgesia, according to James Carroll, medical researcher, and founder and CEO of Thor Photomedicine in Chesham, England

In 2012, researchers at the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London applied LLLT to eye disease. Researcher Dr. Rana Begum and colleagues found that when the retinas of aged mice were exposed to five 90-s exposures of 670-nm light over 35 hours, key inflammatory markers in the mitochondrial membrane were significantly reduced (Neurobiology of Aging). The hope is that, someday, the noninvasive approach may help to slow the progression of dry age-related macular degeneration, according to founder and CEO Clark Tedford.

Did You Know That Gelding Scars Can Cause Problems Many Years Later?

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If your gelding wants to cross canter, or kicks at non-existent flies on his belly, or counter bends at the canter, he may have scar tissue that is causing discomfort. Sometimes the symptoms won’t show up until he moves up the levels: what was mildly irritating at the baby level may become impossible to ignore as the jumps go up, or the movements become more complex. The more the horse has to use his abdominal muscles, the more uncomfortable and tight the gelding scar will feel.

I have learned that if I see a restriction in the pelvis, the cause may be coming from the gelding scar. Myofascial release can be very effective for this problem. Within 10 minutes you will have a more cooperative and happy gelding. Often, what was thought of as a pelvic misalignment will correct itself once the tight scar tissue is softened.