Tag Archives: surgery

New Uses for Cold Laser

Cold laser therapy works by altering or stimulating cellular function. The light energy penetrates, depending on the wavelength, and affects cells and blood vessels. The laser can block a nerve’s ability to send a pain signal to the brain, increasing blood flow or decreasing swelling. It may also significantly speed wound healing.

It’s noninvasive. When used correctly, it doesn’t have any side effects. It can be used weekly or monthly for pets with chronic pain, giving them better quality of life. In cases of severe pain caused by surgery or trauma, laser treatment can be used twice a day for a few days and then daily to diminish pain and speed healing.

Some exciting new areas of study for laser healing are range of motion, baldness, jaw clicking, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and stress. treating stress, anxiety and depression with cold laser therapy. The protocol for stress combines ancient Chinese medicine and laser technology that’s used on acupressure points to boost endorphins and dopamine. These chemicals naturally help your body reduce the physical effects of stress.

Lasers have been shown to speed healing time by about 50%.

Immediate Pain Relief

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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.

Benefits of Low Level Laser Therapy

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Clinical and experimental studies have provided evidence that lasers can increase nerve function, reduce the formation of wounds, increase the metabolic activity of neurons, and enhance myelin production (Bagis et al., 2002). The non-invasive nature of laser photo therapy enables treatment without surgical intervention. Low level laser therapy began to be used in the regeneration and functional recuperation process of peripheral nerves in the 1970s.

Many doctors dismiss cold laser therapy as quackery, which is one of the reasons I have used it so much on myself, family, and friends before I used it on animals that can’t give me verbal feedback. One friend said it did little for her carpal tunnel pain, and went ahead and had surgery. Everyone else reported moderate to complete relief. On myself, it sometimes takes 7-10 sessions for pain to be gone from an injury that has caused chronic pain.

Low Level laser therapy has been used for at least 30 years for pain reduction and tissue repair. There is strong evidence it works and new research is constantly being conducted to refine it.

It works by blocking pain fibers and slowing the transmission of pain messages. This pain blockade allows for a reduction in inflammation and for tissue regeneration.

In one way, LLLT acts like a local anesthetic and reduces pain signals going to the brain. After several treatments the nerves in the affected area become less irritable and pain lessens, allowing muscles to relax and healing to take place.

While some conditions are curable, some need ongoing maintenance and people need to return for a treatment every three months. While not everyone responds to the cold laser, it is used to treat a variety of conditions including neck and back pain, acute and chronic pain, migraine, wounds, arthritic pain, fibromyalgia and lymphedema.

Words of Wisdom

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A quote from Pete Egoscue, author of Pain Free:

Healing and health come from within the individual.

The human body has a genius for problem solving and coping with the unexpected, but when experts take charge by orchestrating onslaughts of toxic chemical compounds and traumatic surgical intervention, on top of a modern culture that features poor nutritional standards and acutely sedentary lifestyles, the cumulative damage can be enormous and lasting.

State of the Art Pain Relief

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Lasers have been studied since they were invented in the 1950’s. Every day I receive notifications of new studies and discoveries of the ways low level laser therapy can stimulate cells to heal.

Studied by NASA and long preferred by professional and Olympic athletes who need to get back into the game as soon as possible, laser technology for treatment of acute and chronic pain associated with neck, back, and other musculoskeletal issues is now becoming popular with the general public.

This state-of-the-art approach to pain treatment applies specific wavelengths of light to promote tissue repair and reduce inflammation in a noninvasive, nonsurgical way. The treatment is painless and for most patients offers relief after just a few appointments.

Why has it taken so long for cold laser therapy to be taken seriously? One difficulty is that the effects can be subtle, failing to provide a clear picture of so called “photobiomodulation” — that the light was somehow triggering novel, positive biochemical activity. A second difficulty is associated with pain therapy, which is a field often associated with fraudulent medical claims.

That’s precisely why a new paper published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science Translation Medicine is so important. The study was performed by a team of researchers at Harvard University’s Engineering, Medical, and Dental schools. The paper offers one of the most conclusive and careful control set experiments ,whose results show clear evidence of photobiomodulation in rats. But what makes the paper truly groundbreaking is that it offers, for the first time, a hypothesis regarding a mechanism by which photobiomodulation may occur in mammals.

A major benefit of laser technology for the treatment of pain is that it can eliminate the need for long term anti-inflammatory usage, steroid injections and other invasive pain treatments, and for many patients, allows them to avoid surgery altogether.

Pain relief usually can occur as fast as 1 minute, decrease in inflammation in 1 hour, and tissue repair begins in one day.

An acute injury requires one to five treatments and for a chronic injury five to 20 treatments. The sooner an injury is treated, the faster it recovers. The recommended frequency for treatment is usually two to three times a week.

I love receiving feedback after your cold laser session, so feel free to leave a testimonial. Thank you!

Acupuncture for Animals

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A key component of traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture can be traced back more than 5,000 years. Acupuncture aims to treat a range of conditions by targeting specific points in the body. It does so through the application of heat, pressure, or laser, with the most widely recognized method being penetration of the skin by thin needles.

Traditional Eastern and contemporary Western medicines differ on their theories of why acupuncture works. Eastern thought holds that stimulating these acupoints corrects the imbalances of qi, or circulating life force, through channels known as meridians. Western physicians largely dismiss such concepts, but they do believe that acupuncture stimulates the nervous system, and can effectively treat musculoskeletal pain, postoperative pain, and nausea.

In veterinary history, acupuncture charts for horses date around 136 AD. Today, the science has been accepted for more than 30 years as a viable treatment for animals of many different species and sizes. It is even covered by some pet insurance companies in Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere.

Most animals actually enjoy acupuncture or cold laser treatment. When older patients are suffering from arthritis, cold laser or acupuncture can be the best choice, since medications are often not tolerated well. In that case, acupuncture is a perfect fit to help manage their chronic pain. I use cold laser, or low level light therapy, in much the same way that acupuncture is used. The advantage is that there is no need to penetrate the skin with the needle.

Painless Therapy for Pain

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There is real relief from pain without the use of habit forming medications that have harmful side effects. If you or your animal have pain from accidents or injuries in the back, hip, joints, neck, etc. relief can be had with the cold laser. Non-thermal photons of light are emitted from the laser , then pass through the skins layers (the dermis, epidermis, and the subcutaneous tissue or tissue fat under the skin.

This light has the ability to penetrate 2 to 5 centimeters below the skin at 90mw and 830 nm. According to a study from the National Institutes of Health, when cells absorb this light energy, it initiates a series of events in the cell that result in normalizing damaged or injured tissue, a reduction in pain, inflammation, edema and an overall reduction in healing time by increasing intracellular metabolism.

Cold Laser Therapy is a non-invasive and non-toxic treatment that uses light energy to repair and regenerate cells of the body. Cold Laser has proven to reduce the need for medication, increase the recovery rates of affected tissue and improve the outcome of the conditions treated. If painful surgery could be avoided, wouldn’t you want to try laser therapy?

Why Laser Therapy?

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Cold laser technology is becoming generally accepted, and health practitioners are using it on a daily basis. Cold lasers are now being used to heal a wide range of nerve, muscle,and joint conditions for animals and humans. Painful arthritis in a joint, or tendonitis can be treated in a non-invasive way with low level laser therapy.

More than 56 million human patients suffer from acute and chronic pain in the U.S. In the not too distant past, this situation was managed with toxic drugs. Cold laser is the only technology proven to eliminate pain, reduce inflammation and accelerate tissue healing through three independent cellular pathways.

Cold laser use has been proven extremely safe and effective (> 90% efficacy) in blinded, randomized, controlled clinical studies.

Animals tolerate cold laser therapy very well. There is no need for sedation. It is fairly quick, and owners can be present. It is also very useful for post-surgery healing, reducing the inflammation in an incision before the patient even wakes up.

Be Pain Free Naturally!

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Watch this video: This is very similar to the Stress Point and Trigger Point Therapy that I do on animals.

http://www.thepainwhisperer.org

Does Your Horse Have a Kissing Spine?

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Many horse owners believe that a diagnosis of “kissing spine” is career ending. It does not have to be. The condition occurs when the bony ‘spikes’ at the top of the horse’s vertebrae start to rub together, causing pain and swelling, especially when in motion. If the long back muscle is very contracted, it can pull the vertebrae together and cause pain. Kissing spine is most prevalent in dressage horses doing many collected movements, jumpers, and upper level event horses. Thoroughbreds seem to be predisposed to developing the problem.

Surgery and injections are often recommended, but I have seen horses recover with the following:

Spreading out the fibers of the tight muscles through massage is one way to allow the spine to return to a normal state. Teaching the horse how to raise his back by releasing the posterior pectoral muscle also helps. Cold laser is another way to ease pain and help relaxation. Proper saddle fitting is essential. Don’t overdo sitting trot. As in humans, it is always worth trying physical therapy solutions before surgery. Chiropractic treatment, cold laser, acupuncture, and massage have all been very effective in many cases.