Coplanar Arrangement of Shortwave Diathermy is the Most Efficient in Skin Temperature Change: A Randomized Crossover Trial

Detailed Summary

Attempting an effective treatment is essential to the physiotherapist to understand how his conducts affect body tissues and the whole system, besides understand properly how and when therapeutic modalities could be use in the rehabilitation process. There are several research articles pointing the use of heat as an efficient agent to accelerate tissue healing. Clarifying the remaining doubts related to therapeutic modalities use can be beneficial for functional rehabilitation. In physiotherapy, shortwave diathermy is one of the standards treatments for heat inducement. The capacitance shortwave technique consists in the use of two pad electrodes that can be positioned in three different arrangements: coplanar (placed side by side on the same aspect of the part to be treated), contraplanar (placed over opposite aspects of the body part to be treated) and longitudinal (one electrode is placed at each end of the limb in opposite aspects of the body par to be treated). There is no evidence of which arrangement is the most efficient. Besides shortwave diathermy being a very established therapeutic modality, the use of this recourse in the most effective way rely on the properly answer of the remaining questions related to its application. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to analyze which one of the capacitance shortwave technique is the most efficient in inducing and maintaining heat. Given the high-frequency waves field orientation could be suggested that the coplanar arrangement will lead to bigger heat inducement, and will maintain it for longer time.

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