Getting ultrasound therapy to fit into a pain management program
Engineer George Lewis would like to move the soothing pain relief of ultrasound out of the doctor’s office and into your medicine cabinet.
The biomedical engineering student, who is about to receive his doctorate from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., is working on a coin-size device to make ultrasound pain relief available any time, anywhere.
Doctors and physical therapists use ultrasound for pain relief for conditions such as muscle spasms, tendonitis, osteoarthritis and sciatica. But the machine ranges from the size of a shoebox to a desktop printer — not a treatment users can easily lug around in daily life.
Lewis’ experimental equipment provides the same relief in a tiny, portable package.
Ultrasound therapy increases blood flow to injured tissue, promoting healing. It also acts like an internal heating pad to ease pain. “It penetrates deep inside the tissue; it actually warms up the tissue from the inside out,” Lewis says.
When applied to the body like a Band-Aid, Lewis says, his tiny ultrasound generator calms aches and joint pain, including the back-of-the-neck twinge of a long day at the office and the long-term aches of bursitis or sciatica. He has tried the device on a few dozen sufferers (including himself, for a twisted knee), and most, he says, report that it relieves their pain — in fact, many test subjects do not want to give the device back to the scientists.
However, the results are very preliminary. Lewis plans to perform a rigorous clinical trial to determine whether the mini-ultrasound is a viable pain treatment.
If it proves effective, he says, it might one day be available in your local drugstore.
“It would be next to the Icy Hot Patch,” he says.
