As laser therapy becomes a standard of care for pet pain across the world, claims about how to best reach target tissue with laser light are becoming more and more confusing. In addition to selecting a wavelength within the therapeutic window, here are the two keys to what you need to know about dosing at a therapeutic depth:
1. Power is directly related to delivering a therapeutic dosage at depth
2. Contact with the tissue matters
Higher powers enable greater depth of effective penetration to deep target tissues. If you are treating chronic arthritis or hip dysplasia– you need power to deliver an effective dose to those deeply located target tissues. Class IV therapy lasers have an effective power to treat both deep and superficial conditions.
Contact with the tissue gives you several advantages. First, compressing tissue allows you to get up to 1.5 cm closer to your target tissue – just through compression. Second, compressing the tissue pushes many superficial incidental absorbers out of the way, providing more energy at depth.
With on-contact Class IV therapy laser deep tissue treatment applicators, you can deliver up to 90% more photons to the target tissue because of the reduced scatter and closer proximity to target tissue.
Be sure you examine a “contact” handpiece closely – if there is space between the tissue and the delivery surface – you are not making contact with the tissue.
