Whether you’re climbing the stairs, walking the dog, or simply getting up from a seated position, knee pain can make even the smallest movement challenging and unpleasant. It can make you want to avoid activity altogether and become more sedentary, which leads to hundreds of other problems in the long run.
Knee pain is a complex problem with many potential causes, and recovering from a knee issue can take time. However, if you want to speed up your healing, you should consider cold laser therapy. How can a laser help your knee pain go away? First, you need to understand how knee pain typically works and why you may not prefer other solutions.
What Knee Pain Usually Means
As with most other areas of the body, when your knee hurts, it is often a result of inflammation, which manifests through redness and swelling in soft tissues like muscles and ligaments. This inflammation presses against nerves in and around the knee, making it difficult to use this joint without significant pain. Even if you haven’t specifically injured your knee, the area may have become worn down or damaged over time, triggering chronic pain.
Options for Treating Knee Pain
Depending on the source of your knee pain, you may be encouraged to consider any of the following treatments by a physician:
- Heat/cold therapy
- Physical therapy
- Steroid injections
- Pain medication
- Knee replacement surgery or other surgery
For milder knee pain, basic care through certain knee exercises can strengthen the surrounding muscles and resolve the issue, but for more advanced cases, injections, pain medications, and surgery can seem drastic and have lasting negative effects.
Fortunately, some chiropractors offer another, more modern and less invasive treatment that can help you overcome knee pain: cold laser therapy. Unlike normal lasers that cut or sever, a cold laser has an anti-inflammatory effect on tissue, drawing in less damaging blood flow and more healing nutrients.
How Laser Therapy Benefits Knee Injuries and Pain
Although the knee joint obviously involves bones, it mostly consists of a complicated network of muscles and ligaments. Whether you have knee surgery or just chronic pain, laser light therapy can help you recover more quickly by invigorating the hard and soft tissue cells. Photons of light penetrate the tissues, allowing more oxygen and nutrients to enter the cells. As a result, they regenerate at a faster rate, helping you heal more efficiently.
How Often Laser Therapy Needs to Be Administered
Unfortunately, cold laser therapy may not have immediate results. This painless treatment may take several appointments before you notice pain reduction, which means you may need to have it done a couple of times a week, especially if your injury is new. However, over time, you may find that treatment is helping you recover more quickly than you would have otherwise.
In some cases, other treatments may be necessary for addressing knee pain, but cold laser therapy can be used to help your body heal using its own natural processes. It’s definitely worth looking into and considering!
About the Author
At Wills Chiropractic, Dr. Chad Wills has been practicing for more than 20 years. In the county, he is one of only two chiropractors who are certified in Chiropractic Biophysics, the most studied treatment protocol in the field. If you are interested in learning more about cold laser therapy and other treatments Dr. Wills provides, you may contact our office in Naples online or over the phone at 239-331-6060.