What is TECAR therapy?
TECAR Therapy is a form of endogenous thermotherapy (it heals your body by creating heat inside it) based on radio waves. It is also known as “capacitive and resistive electrical transfer”. Other types of laser therapy include TENS and PEMF, which use different wavelengths. We chose a TECAR machine at Advanced Physio Care because its effectiveness is well supported by the academic literature. It is also popular with athletes and many of our patients are professional or amateur athletes. I have treated a SEA Games Gold Medallist with the TECAR machine at Advanced Physio Care.
How Does TECAR Therapy work?
Have you ever hit your knee really hard and then rubbed it to make the pain go away? The pain doesn’t actually go away. What happens is the surrounding nerves are stimulated by the friction and the pain signal from your knee gets confused. The pain remains the same, but the brain doesn’t register it as much. When you go through TECAR Therapy, an electrode head will be placed on the site of your pain, and you will feel a zapping. This zapping creates the same effect and it works for much more intense pain. This nerve stimulation can stop your nerves compounding the effect of the initial pain and can ease the inflammation, therefore reducing pain.
In addition, the heat speeds up your metabolism. This causes your blood to flow faster and to become more oxygenated. The result is that more oxygen, and other healing properties of your body’s natural systems, are rushed to the site. The waste is also removed more quickly. The overall result is that your pain is reduced significantly, and the injury is healed more quickly.
Experiments Indicate that it Reduces Experienced Pain by More Than Half
An experiment ran by Osti et al (2015) investigated TECAR and another light therapy on 66 people who were experiencing pain. They used two pain scales to assess the changes:
- A visual pain scale used by the person administering the treatment (Visual Analogic Scale).
- An experienced pain scale used to help patients self-report pain increase and decrease (Oswestry Disability Scale).
The reported pain went from 54.0 ± 13.0 on the scale that mesure experienced pain to 23.5 ± 19.8 over the course of 10 sessions and 3 weeks. The effect was particularly strong for TECAR used on leg and back pain.
On top of this Hawamdeh (2014) performed a very useful literature review of the work on TECAR therapy. He found that the literature supported the claim that it is effectively able to treat knee, shoulder, hip, ankle, spinal column, hand, muscle injuries rapidly, as well as painful inflammatory, osteoarticular and muscular disorders (arthrosis, lumbago, sciatica).
So yeah, we love our TECAR machine, it provides people with serious pain relief, and we live for that!
TECAR Therapy is used by the World’s Top Athletes
TECAR Therapy is very popular with professional athletes, especially runners. Our Clinic Director, Steven, has been part of the team that treated a famous Singapore athlete who won a gold medal at the SEAsian Games (but we can’t tell you who, or we’d have to kill you..!). Human TECAR has references from professional athletes like sprinters Usain Bolt (the fastest man in the world lots of times) and Justin Gatlin, marathon runner Eliud Kipchoge, and gymnast Vanessa Ferrari.
We have a TECAR machine at Advanced Physio Care, which we used on this unnameable top Singapore athlete. If you have a running injury and a big race coming up, you are welcome to come and try the TECAR machine yourslf. The machine consists of electrode pads that provide the electrotherapy technologies, and will also be supported by manual techniques that need a physiotherapist to perform them. You can have a 30-minute treatment on our machine for $88 to see if it helps you.
Do you want to try TECAR Therapy?
Now you know more about TECAR Therapy, you can see that there is an excellent chance it will really relieve your pain. Everyone’s pain is a little bit different in our experience, so we do recommend seeing a certified physiotherapist to make sure that you get the best pain-management and recovery regime for you. If you don’t know where to start, book a call with us via our telehealth option – the $20-minute video conference call.
Please visit us at #03-08 SBF Centre near to Capital Tower or book a 20-minute video conference call with Steven Xuelong Qin (our clinic Director) for $20 to get a consultation and discuss treatment options for your pain or injury using our telehealth option (we will collect payment on booking). You can also try our TECAR machine of your injury or pain for just $88 for a 30-minute session.
