Shin splints are a painful condition that can cause your legs to hurt every time you move. When it doesn’t resolve quickly, it interferes with your ability to be active and go about your daily life.
Chronic shin splints can be distressing, but amazingly, revolutionary advances in treatments mean a regenerative treatment called pulse wave therapy can treat your condition quickly, effectively, and noninvasively. Understand from experienced podiatrists Ryan Golub, DPM, and Zachary Flynn, DPM, AACFAS, from Arizona Foot Health in Phoenix, Arizona, how pulse wave therapy can help cure shin splints.
Your shin is the bone that goes down the front of your leg and connects the knee to the ankle. Shin splints are a painful condition characterized by ongoing pain that radiates down the front of your shin bone from small injuries or inflammation to the bones, muscles, and tissues in the area.
Shin splints are especially common in active adults, particularly if you recently upped your activity levels. Structural abnormalities like flat feet and wearing improper shoes for your activity or foot type can also increase your risk.
Although shin splints don’t usually cause severe long-term damage, the pain can be debilitating enough to keep you sidelined from sports and other activities you enjoy.
Sometimes, shin splints are a short-term problem that improves with conservative care, such as rest, icing your shins, stretching, and changing your shoes. When these treatments don’t work and your problem is chronic, pulse wave therapy is a nonsurgical treatment that can fix your shin splints once and for all.
Pulse wave therapy treatment is faster and more cost-effective than getting treatments like physical therapy for advanced cases of shin splints. Physical therapy can take more sessions and time to be effective and can be more costly over time.
Pulse wave therapy uses ballistic sound wave energy to radiate energy into the damaged areas around your shins. Once a session is complete, the sound waves cause your body to start a regenerative process that improves circulation and grows new, healthy tissues.
After just 4-5 treatments that take only a few minutes each, up to 80% of people experience significant relief from their foot or ankle problem from pulse wave therapy.
Pulse wave therapy sessions are office-based and are comfortable and safe throughout. You can relax completely and sit or lie down during sessions.
Before the session starts, your clinician identifies the area that will most benefit from using the pulse wave therapy wand. They put gel on the area to facilitate the transmission process.
Our team uses the applicator wand that emits ballistic sound waves over the areas causing you pain. You’ll feel your practitioner moving the wand slowly in circular patterns.
Any minor discomfort you feel during the procedure is an indication of the sound waves working to facilitate the healing process. The entire session only takes a few minutes.
You can go right back to your typical daily plans once treatment is finished. A full treatment course takes up to five sessions, but many people start feeling less pain after just 1-2.
Shin splints can be very painful, but with pulse wave therapy, it doesn’t have to be permanent. Contact us to find out if Pulse Wave Therapy is right for treating your shin splints or other foot or ankle conditions.
