♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous ♪
♪ physical therapists ♪
♪ On the internet ♪
- Hi folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And we are the most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
- Today we're gonna discuss
ultrasound therapy for pain relief.
This is actually a home unit.
Is it worth buying?
You must know this.
This is the information you're gonna need
if you're thinking about going down that road.
- Right, exactly.
- It's funny with a lot of stuff now, Brad,
they're, you know, stuff that before, like a TENS unit,
always had to be done by a professional
and now you can buy your own online.
- Right, right, so.
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- Yeah.
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- Those short versions are shorter than our intro.
(laughs)
- Yeah, 60 seconds of Bob and Brad.
- All right, ultrasound therapy,
you know, a lotta people are familiar with it.
This is not the ultrasound that you use for diagnostic.
- Right.
- There's ultrasound where,
you know, if a woman is pregnant.
- To determine the sex of the baby.
- Yep.
- And that's diagnostic ultrasound.
- Right, they use it to find blood clots.
This is therapeutic ultrasound designed primarily
for a deep, a source of deep heat, increasing circulation,
which is very true, they know that happens.
And chiropractors, therapists,
for decades have been using it.
- I've been using it my entire career.
- Right, right. - Some 30-some years.
I don't use it as much now, but I still use it.
- Right, so if you are looking at it
and you've seen some wonderful studies
or wonderful, I should say
- Comments. - Comments
- or, articles.
- The marketing is like get this
for pain relief, blah, blah, blah.
We're gonna give you our.
- Our opinion.
- Right, and if you're gonna buy one,
there are some things you really need to know
to make sure you buy the right one.
So we're gonna get to this in just a minute.
So again the significant gains,
you can go four to five centimeters is
what the studies show.
- It penetrates that deep.
- Right that deep and that's good.
- Yes it is.
- There's nothing wrong with that.
That's very good.
But again is it?
They've done studies with people's physical therapy
without ultrasound and ones with ultrasounds.
- Right.
- And the results are not significant,
that if you use ultrasound
it's gonna make a significant difference.
- Yeah, it's just that the studies aren't holding up
to be really supportive.
- Right.
- They're not negative,
but they're not real supportive either.
- So like Bob, I use it occasionally.
There's certain instances depending on
what I'm trying to achieve with a specific patient,
but it's not very often.
- And I tend to use it more as what we call phonophoresis
where I'm using the ultrasound waves to push medicine in.
And that's not something you can do yourself at home
because the medicine you have to get is a prescription.
- Right.
- And I'm not sure even, actually the layperson
maybe could get it, but it'd be a lot more difficult.
- The FBI might be coming over (laughs).
- Yeah that's right somebody would be knocking on your door.
- You need a doctor's prescription or whatnot.
- Yeah.
- The only time I will use it, if I wanna get deep heat
and I wanna like increase range of motion.
- Sure.
- I mean would consider it with a frozen shoulder.
- I would too, I would too, absolutely.
- It wouldn't be my first go to but I might consider it.
So if you decided you're gonna.
- Give it a go.
- Get an ultrasound, I've looked 'em up on the internet
to find, ghees, are there any good ones you can just buy?
And are they gonna be strong enough?
- Right.
- And is it, you know, adequate?
So here's what you need to, well, first of all,
if you do have one of the following instances, like,
if you have skin that's not healthy.
- Right, these are like contraindications basically
or warnings of. - Right.
- Where you won't wanna use this,
so don't go buy a unit when you have one of these things.
- Right, if you had a elbow you think
you're gonna use ultrasound on
but the skin, you may, if you have a rash there,
or you have a injury or particularly.
- Open area of course. - Open area,
you're not gonna use it.
Cancer, if you have.
- Yeah, any cancer pain, you can't use it for that.
- If someone says they have cancer or history of cancer
I don't even consider it.
- Right.
- Pregnant, obviously you're not gonna use it,
you know, around the fetus.
- Right. - Area at all.
Not by your eyes and not over
- [Both] bones.
- If you go over your bone versus muscle,
'cause you wanna ultrasound that joint,
it's gonna hurt.
- What it starts to do is it starts to heat up
the outer edge of the bone, the outer layer of the bone
and I've felt that periosteal pain.
- Sure.
- I mean I haven't felt it recently.
You felt it not too long ago you said?
- No, I did it to myself. - Oh.
- 'cause when I was a student
it's like, well you can't go over a bone,
but they always say
you're not gonna hurt yourself with ultrasound.
- Right.
- So I thought I'm gonna do it
and sure enough I went over my bone,
and sure enough it was painful.
- Yeah.
- So I stopped and everything was fine.
- I've met patients that have mentioned it to me
and then we back off right away.
- There's no benefit. - No, no.
- From trying to fight through that pain.
- No, no, not at all.
- And now then my biggest concern is
that if you're gonna buy an ultrasound unit,
you have to get the right specs.
- Sure.
- So I got a board here to help show that
and so you can pause this if you want to.
- Mike, can you see this okay?
- Yeah, is that clear enough? - All right.
- First of all if you're looking,
the cost seems to be around a couple of hundred dollars,
you can get some cheaper ones,
you can get 'em a little more expensive,
but somewhere in that range, but look at the specs.
The frequency, this is megahertz.
Now oftentimes, they are rated
at one megahertz or three megahertz.
Three megahertz will not go as deep into the muscle.
One megahertz can go up to four or five centimeters,
if you're doing three megahertz,
you might get one centimeter.
- Oh really?
- Yeah, so if you're getting one,
make sure it's rated one megahertz.
- Okay, gotcha. - If you want deep heat.
The wattage, now this is a little confusing.
I use, I always go one to two watts is
what I've always used clinically,
but that's watts per centimeter squared.
- Right.
- It has to do, if you look at
this is one of our ultrasounds, this is an older one.
- Old unit, yeah.
- But the surface area of the head relates to the wattage.
- The square units of the.
- Right, the square centimeters.
- Sure.
- Now I looked up one online, it put out six watts,
now don't get that confused
with watts per centimeter squared, 'cause I read further
and the head was a four centimeter square surface area,
so you have to do some math.
So this unit doesn't put out
six watts per centimeter squared.
- Four divided into six.
- Yeah, it actually puts out one and a half watts.
- 1.5.
- Which isn't too bad actually,
that's enough. - That would do it,
that would do it. - That would probably do it.
So if you make sure you get the right frequency,
the right wattage, and then the treatment time,
we go seven to eight minutes. - Yeah.
- and that's enough.
The thing about ultrasound, if you wanna do a big area,
if you think you're gonna do your whole quadricep,
you're not. - Right.
- You can do an area.
- It's good for confined areas.
- Right, you know, the area of a,
well maybe a silver dollar. - Orange, or.
- Or yeah orange, yeah.
- Apple? (laughs)
- Right, and the other big thing is look at this,
this is really critical. - Oh yeah.
- It has to be pain free.
If you're experiencing pain or it's getting warm,
it's like it's getting hot, that's not acceptable,
you cannot be that warm.
- Yeah, you've gotta kinda know
what you're doing with these. - Yep.
- I mean, you gotta follow the instructions,
with our head you have to keep it moving.
- Yep.
You're not supposed to take the head away.
- Head off, away.
- [Both] From the body.
- It's hard on the crystals. - Yeah.
- And the head.
There's a lot more to this
and we do have a video on how to use an ultrasound unit,
you can google Bob and Brad ultrasound
and look at that for more details.
- Yeah.
- So, ultrasound, can you buy one?
Yes.
Should you?
We're thinking probably there's better ways
to treat yourself. - Right, right.
- But if you want to go ahead, use these specs,
look at our video on how to use it in detail
'cause you do need gel. - Yeah.
A gel. - Innate gel.
That's not gonna have medication in it.
- Yeah.
- Don't use it with IcyHot and that kind of stuff (laughs).
- Right, right, so a lot of things to keep in mind.
- Right, so good luck and enjoy.
- Thanks.
(upbeat music)