If you’ve been perusing this website, you’ve probably read about numerous treatments and therapies. While you should always see a chiropractor for individualized guidance, having more knowledge will help you ask better questions. The following five facts about K-Laser will help you decide if this FDA-approved treatment option is right for you.
Pain Relief
Pain relief is one of the top reasons people see a chiropractor. Whether you’ve been in a car accident or have a job with a lot of repetitive motion, pain can make everyday activities much more complicated and significantly diminish your quality of life.
While many people equate pain with creaky knees or an aching back, shoulder pain can complicate various upper-body activities. When you consider how many ways you use your fingers, wrists, arms, and hands each day, it’s easy to see how even a minor shoulder issue can profoundly impact your everyday life.
Shoulder impingement is a painful condition after an accident or repetitive strain. It can also occur because of the ordinary “wear-and-tear” aging that comes to us all as we age. These circumstances can all lead to swollen tendons. Since these tendons are the ones that connect your shoulder muscles to the muscles at the top of your arm, it makes anything that involves lifting your arm painful and more difficult due to the muscle weakness it can cause.
Fortunately, research has shown that K-Laser therapy is helpful for this type of pain. In fact, a detailed analysis of multiple studies revealed that K-Laser therapy was beneficial for relieving shoulder impingement pain. Since the effectiveness of this therapy depends so much on the specific wavelengths used, seeing a chiropractor with specialty training will ensure you maximize your results.
Enhanced Quality of Life
Quality of life means so many different things to different people that it can sound like an opinion and something incompatible with a scientific approach to medicine. This isn’t true at all. While your feelings are individualized, we now have ways of measuring quality of life.
Investigating quality of life is particularly important for individuals with chronic conditions. These diseases and syndromes often have a variety of symptoms. Mysterious remissions and exacerbations can also characterize them.
One such condition is fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is an autoimmune disorder that causes pain that can occur anywhere in the body, debilitating fatigue, and difficulty with concentration, memory, and other cognitive tasks. Since it involves such a large constellation of mental and physical symptoms, fibromyalgia can significantly disrupt your life.
The current thinking is that excessive and inappropriate nerve stimulation triggers a biochemical cascade that intensifies the brain’s perception of pain. Therefore, when you have fibromyalgia, you’re more prone to feeling pain from normal stimuli, such as the pressure of your body while sitting in a chair or the feeling of a clothing label resting against your skin. Fibromyalgia can also intensify fatigue, memory difficulties, and other mental symptoms through similar neurological processes on different pathways.
According to medical scientists, low-light laser therapy such as K-Laser therapy improved several symptoms measured on the Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire. This survey asks questions about common fibromyalgia symptoms that affect your quality of life. Some of the scores that improved after treatment include:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Fatigue
- Pain severity
- Number of fibromyalgia tender points
- Stiffness
Wound Healing
You’ve probably had a variety of wounds throughout your lifetime. Whether paper cuts or large gashes, injuries all have one thing in common: you want them to heal as completely and quickly as possible.
While even a minor scrape is technically a wound, the severity of injuries and the pain they cause vary quite a bit. Oral mucositis is an excruciatingly painful condition in which the oral mucosa or the skin lining inside your mouth becomes swollen and irritated. When your oral mucosa is in this condition, you’re much more likely to get painful ulcers that can become infected.
Chemotherapy and radiation are the most common causes of oral mucositis. This is because these treatments attack healthy cells as well as cancerous ones. Fortunately, research has shown that K-Laser therapy is helpful for these kinds of wounds.
A recently published research study used K-Laser therapy to treat oral mucositis wounds. After only one week, 57% of patients had complete healing of their wounds. Although not everyone had a completely healed wound, everyone in the study reported dramatic reductions in pain.
Since the patients were undergoing cancer treatment, their bodies were continually exposed to radiation and chemotherapy drugs, making it likely that they would develop new oral wounds throughout the study. The patients receiving K-Laser therapy had fewer fresh wounds compared to those who didn’t receive laser sessions.
Banished Bacteria
While fungi, parasites, and viruses can worsen wounds, bacteria are often the chief culprits in a festering sore. Reducing a wound’s bacterial exposure is extremely important. This is why you must keep wounds clean and cover them as prescribed.
While this is standard advice, research has uncovered another way to reduce bacteria. K-Laser therapy treatments reduced bacterial counts in contaminated wounds. In this study, these wounds resulted from traumatic injuries, which tended to be more complex and severe. The researchers combined wavelengths of 660 nm, 800 nm, 905 nm, and 970 nm for therapeutic effect, indicating that you need a chiropractor with specialty training and experience for any bacterial reduction sessions that include K-Laser therapy.
Boosted Levels of Beneficial Nutrients
While limiting the bacteria in the wound bed is vital to healing, some factors are more internal than external. This is also the case for many health conditions, not just wounds.
If you’re living with diabetes, your body is more susceptible to various health conditions, including infections, heart disease, and depression. These conditions vary considerably, yet you can limit or even prevent them by eating a healthy diet.
If you’ve been living with diabetes for any time, you’ve probably seen a Registered Dietician or Clinical Nutritionist for individualized dietary advice. Vitamin D and magnesium are among the nutrients that persons with diabetes are encouraged to consume.
While Vitamin D and magnesium have other functions, one of their most beneficial functions if you’re living with diabetes, is nerve health. When your nerves are healthy, you feel great, and your body can move as designed.
Excellent nerve health also helps stave off one of the worst complications of diabetes: peripheral neuropathy. Peripheral neuropathy occurs when your peripheral nerves or any of the nerves that aren’t in the brain or spinal cord are damaged. Since this is such a large portion of the body, peripheral neuropathy can lead to many issues.
Nerve damage, such as peripheral neuropathy, causes pain, numbness, and dysfunction. Fortunately, K-Laser therapy boosts levels of these beneficial nutrients in your body. This enhanced delivery helps your nerves reap their benefits and repair themselves toward better neurological health.
Make These Five Your Way Forward
Scientific studies can help you feel more confident in making the best health decisions. So can talking with an expert. Schedule an appointment online with our Denver Chiropractic team to discuss your path forward toward optimal health.