As many of you may know, my battle with chronic pain from previous injury has been a long (and expensive) one. It gets old, fast, when no matter the hour most evenings I spend rolling, stretching, hot/cold buckets/ massage, strengthening, etc nothing seems to get rid of it. I still wake up every morning in pain the minute I get out of bed and put my feet on the floor. I still have pain every time I walk down a flight of stairs. I still have pain for the first 15-20 minutes of every run I have. Pain in the heel. Pain in the Achilles. Pain in the ankle....
...For 3 fucking years
I have spent THOUSANDS.... Scans. Physio appointments. Expert ankle surgeon consultations. Custom orthotics. Massage Therapy. Microcurrent Therapy. Heat therapy. Equipment. I have done the exercises. Taken the supplements and the pain remains. All of these things have helped, and have allowed me to manage it. It's got me through running again and to running a long fucking way. But the pain persists.
Me being me, I like to do my research and have been looking into why it's such a troublesome set of injuries I have. And me being me (very prone to accidents and inadvertently inflicting damage upon myself), have been looking to something I can do at home. Enter LLLT - Low Level Laser Light Therapy, also called Cold Laser Therapy (because when you say LLLT it sounds like a stutter after you've bitten your own tongue).
(admit it... you just tried to say it, didn't you)
Looking into Cold Laser treatment I was sceptical. I mean... frickin' laser beams! If you're a big kid at heart (especially a boy) then this is the type of treatment that sounds awesome! Come on! Laser-fucking-beams!! It's like you can be in an episode of Star Trek! Wave a magic light beam on you after a battle and hey-presto... you're healed! What's not to love about that?
As a result, I dutifully invested in one of the top handheld devices in the space, after a recommendation the B-Cure Pro. Despite the crazy hyped marketing for this product, I figured that it if worked at the same frequency and power used which had shown to be effective in the medical studies I'd read, then if anything would work it'd be this.
It works quite simply by stimulating a cellular bio-chemical reaction that significantly improves ATP production in the cells mitochondria. Normally a good massage would help increase blood flow to perform this in muscles, however scar tissue and tendon/ligament tissue has very poor blood flow. This is why tendon/ligament injuries take so goddam long to heal.
My approach is that targeting the scarred areas specifically, including the retrocalcaneal bursitis which is hard to get at, should help.
Results: Two weeks in and there is a marked difference. The pain has gone from a 6 to a 3 and for the first time in years I get out of bed without the kind of pain in my ankle that has me hobbling like I've shat myself, and can now walk down a set of stairs without wincing or having to come down sideways.
I'm starting to add back in the strengthening work now. I'd stopped while doing this test as the pain was pretty bad, and I wanted to see if the cold laser treatment actually made a noticeable difference. It has. Yesterday's long run was a hot 14km and the way my ankle and heel felt, I was expecting to hurt quite badly when I got up this morning. I treated the sore points last night and today it's pretty good. Just mild stiffness pain which eased quickly.
This makes me happy.
I mean... laser-fucking-beams? Who knew?!
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