Shockwave therapy works by triggering your body's own healing response, not by adding outside cells. It stimulates collagen, blood flow, and stem cells during early healing, but can't rebuild tissue that's completely gone. Chiropractors should ensure it fits their practice before investing.
How does shockwave fit in with regeneration, regenerating tissue and or stem cells? A lot of confusion. How does shockwave fit in?
The best way that I can describe it is the same way that chiropractic helps the body heal. Shockwave works the same way. We're not infusing exogenous anything. No new stem cells, no new x, y or z, no new blood flow. All of it is stimulating the body in the right way at the right time, the right person to create that environment for healing. So once we go through that initial phase of inflammation after an injury, we're supposed to hit that two week mark of subacute level of healing, right? Which is where collagen lay down, should happen, where all the stem cells should be proliferating and creating new tissue. And oftentimes with how busy we are or how immobile we are or how unhealthy we are, we can just lay down scar tissue and the body says, that's enough, I'm stable, we're good. And our job, then with a shock wave and other regenerative therapies, we go into that old and decrepit tissue, we stimulate that process that's supposed to happen at that two week mark, which is getting the collagen improvement, getting the blood flow improvement, and proliferating the stem cells. So what we're doing is we're stimulating the tissue that already exists to replicate itself some more. Got it. And so when I'm talking about bringing in, you know, chondrocytes or fibrinogen or anything like that to have more of it, I need that already there. So there are some people who are too far gone. And I can't just go in and build tissue from nothing. Right. Which is sometimes a misconception. And people get really over the ridge, over the bridge of like, hey, no matter where I'm at, I can bring back collagen or bone, I can reformat that tissue. No, unfortunately, we can't go that far. If somebody is completely bone on bone with no cartilage whatsoever, regardless of the stimuli that I create in there, and shockwave being one of the best at proliferation of regenerative cells, there's nothing I can do about it. Right. If there's a little bit there that we can make more robust, fantastic, let's do it. But definitely that's what I'm looking to do. And it's not the therapy. It's the human body's nature in the response of that particular stimuli.
That makes sense. I've talked with dozens of docs I think there are thousands that literally that have heard about Shockwave and have considered adding it to their practice, but haven't yet. What are some of the primary considerations you'd recommend that a chiropractor who's thinking about it thinks about before they make a buying decision?
For sure. As much, and I love to make sure people have their foundations in the right place before we start thinking about bringing a technology into the practice. When we talk to the chiropractors, that's some of the things that we can get lost in. I can bring in red light therapy is going to change my world. I can now do weight loss. Now I'm going to see more patients. I'm going to do this. It has to be congruent with the type of patients that you want to see. First of all, you have to have a good foundation of your systems, make sure you know your numbers and all this kind of stuff, because regardless of the machine you get, there's an investment in there. Yep. Whether it's time, a lot of money, combination of the two. If we don't know what we're doing from a chiropractic standpoint and a business standpoint, then regardless of the technology coming in, it can be a stress on the system. Yep. My whole goal when somebody's looking to add this into the practice is that they're doing great. They're looking to amplify themselves without bringing on maybe another new doctor in the realm. They want to see the same type of people they're already seeing, but almost expand just the width of their practice to be able to. To tune in to other ailments that they're not necessarily targeting, like tennis elbow, golfer's elbow, frozen shoulder. Yes. We. We see those patients chiropractically, but then they're also being seen by the orthopedist for those problems. Right. If we can keep those problems in house, we're making a more robust therapy option for the patients that we already love to see. So those are some of the things that I want to make sure that we consider going. Going into it, is that it's the right time for that therapy to be added into the practice.
Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks so much for checking out that interview. If you liked it, we have plenty more available. You can check out the next interview right here.
