What is Shockwave Therapy?
Shockwave Therapy, more formally extracorporeal shockwave therapy, uses focused acoustic pressure waves delivered through a handheld applicator directly into injured tissue. These pressure waves are not electrical shocks. They are pulses of energy that pass through the skin and create controlled micro-trauma in the targeted tissue, which sounds counterintuitive until you understand what that micro-trauma triggers. The body responds to this controlled disruption by increasing blood flow to the area, stimulating the growth of new blood vessels, and kickstarting collagen production, essentially restarting a healing response that has stalled out. This makes it especially effective for chronic tendon conditions where the tissue has stopped healing on its own. Plantar fasciitis that has not responded to stretching and orthotics, tennis elbow, golfer's elbow, Achilles tendinopathy, and calcific tendinitis in the shoulder are the conditions where shockwave tends to make the biggest difference, precisely because these are cases where the body's normal repair process has essentially given up. Sessions are brief, typically lasting only a few minutes, and most treatment plans call for several sessions spaced roughly a week apart to build a cumulative healing response.
Dosing matters more than people expect. The intensity, frequency, and treatment head size all need to be matched to the specific tissue and how deep the target sits beneath the skin, and getting this wrong either under-treats the area or causes unnecessary discomfort. A therapist trained in shockwave application adjusts these settings based on your specific condition and your tolerance during treatment, checking in throughout the session rather than running a single fixed protocol on everyone who walks through the door, since two people with the same diagnosis rarely need the same dose.
