Cold Laser Therapy: A Boon for Baby Boomers’ Aging Joints
More than 31 million people in the United States suffer from arthritis, and this number is expected to jump to more than 78 million by 2040, due in large part to the aging Baby Boomer generation. To keep up with these staggering numbers, medical researchers are continually exploring new ways to halt the degenerative disease.
Here at Midtown East Physical Therapy, our goal is to help our midtown Manhattan patients in New York lead healthy and active lives long into the future, and a key to that is restoring function to their joints. To that end, we offer cold laser therapy, an effective regenerative treatment that works with your body’s own natural resources to rebuild damaged soft tissue.
If you’d like to explore why cold laser therapy is a boon for Baby Boomers’ aging joints, here’s a quick look at how this exciting therapy works.
The osteoarthritis problem
Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint condition that leads to the breakdown of cartilage, a tough, viscous tissue that covers the ends of the bones in your joints, preventing them from rubbing against each other.
As you get older, simple wear-and-tear begins to leave its mark and your cartilage starts to break down. Without this protective tissue, the bones in your joints don’t glide as smoothly, which causes pain and inflammation, often placing limitations on your mobility and range of motion.
Typically, the medical world has only treated arthritis through anti-inflammatory medications, steroid injections, physical therapy, and minimally invasive surgeries. In extreme cases, whole joints can be replaced if the cartilage is beyond repair. While these measures are effective to some degree, and a good physical therapy program can help slow the progression of your disease, few treatments have offered any regenerative solutions.
Thanks to a better understanding of, and advances in, laser technology, we’re able to refine this treatment method to address your aging joints.
Healing damaged joints
The brass ring of arthritis treatment has been finding a way to promote cartilage repair and regeneration, which your body can only do in very limited ways. In fact, most of the time, when your cartilage is damaged, it’s irreversible.
That’s where cold laser therapy comes in. With this innovative technology, we use low-level laser light, delivered at a very specific wavelength, to signal a healing response in your soft tissue. The laser energy is mild enough that it doesn’t cause any thermal damage to the surface of your skin or your surrounding tissue.
The laser energy travels into the tissue below, where it’s absorbed, causing an interaction in your cells that creates new energy. The light energy not only breathes new life into damaged cells, it creates an analgesic effect that relieves pain and an anti-inflammatory effect that gives your body time to repair the joint.
Cold laser treatment
Each cold laser therapy session lasts only minutes, and since it’s noninvasive, you can get back to your daily activities right away. You’ll typically need several treatments and your results will be gradual, as your body needs time to regenerate and repair at its own pace.
If your arthritis affects more than one joint, as it often does, we’ll develop an appropriate schedule to ensure that we address all of your impacted areas. And if your arthritis begins to creep back in after some time, you simply return for follow-up treatments to jumpstart your cell regeneration again.
If aging joints are putting serious limitations on your life, call us to learn more about cold laser therapy. You can also book an appointment online today.