4 Many of the sailors had stress fractures in both legs, so the study involved a total of forty-three fractures. Rue and coworkers at Johns Hopkins University studied twenty-six US Navy recruits with tibial stress fractures.
#Bone stimulator trial#
To date, only one peer-reviewed clinical trial has investigated ultrasound as a treatment for stress fractures.Ī 2004 article by J.P. These claims are based on research in lab rats with artificially-induced fractures, so it’s unclear if these same benefits extend to stress fractures as well. The pulses of ultrasonic waves generated by a bone growth stimulator claim to speed up bone healing by increasing the cellular uptake of calcium in bone cells and speeding up the rate at which new bone cells solidify. The patients who used the placebo device had fully healed from their broken bone in 114 days, while the patients who used the ultrasound bone growth stimulator healed in only 86 days.īone stimulators are also used to treat nonunion fractures, a situation where the bone on each side of a fracture does not heal back together, though the research is less clear on whether ultrasound bone stimulation is helpful in these cases.Ī 2012 review study concluded that low-intensity ultrasound waves were effective at speeding up healing in “fresh” fractures, but a lack of quality studies prevented the authors from endorsing it for nonunion fractures. 1īoth the patients and the doctors were “blinded” to which treatment they received, so there would be no potential bias in interpreting how well the bone fractures were healing. A 1994 study in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery randomly assigned sixty-seven patients with fractured tibias to either an ultrasound bone growth stimulator or a placebo device. Ultrasound bone growth stimulators have been used to treat regular bone fractures with fairly good success. The stress fracture treatment you have been waiting for?
#Bone stimulator how to#
Then we will discuss new research on how to return to running as quickly as possible once your fracture has healed. Today we’ll take a look at whether this technology can help you get back running faster following a stress fracture. Recently, some doctors have been prescribing a special machine called a bone growth stimulator which uses pulsed waves of ultrasound in an effort to get stress fractures to heal more rapidly. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to speed up that recovery period?
It can completely shut down any plans for a season of racing, and worse, the only treatment is that dreaded four-letter-word: rest.Įven one or two unplanned days off can be irritating if you’re a serious runner, but being required to take four, six, or eight weeks off to let a stress fracture heal can be truly agonizing. A stress fracture is a runner’s worst nightmare.
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