To Vibrate or Not?

The American Journal of Sports Medicine has just published our work on vibration and tendon healing.

Vibration therapy is quite useful for a number of conditions and particularly in preventing bone loss in the skeleton. We thought it might be useful to help enhance healing after rotator cuff repair.

Patrick Lam, with the assistance of Geffrey Keighley and Kaitlyn Hansen completed a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial as part of his PhD at the University of New South Wales and found that applying a vibrating device to the shoulder was effective at reducing pain early on, at 6 weeks.

Apart from the benefits of pain relief, vibration to the shoulder didn’t have any additional beneficial effects on rotator cuff tendon healing. The study did show very good results in both groups of patients – those receiving the real device and those receiving the dummy device – with high patient satisfaction following arthroscopic rotator cuff repair, rapid improvement in symptoms and a very low re-tear rate, less than 10%, one of the lowest published re-tear rates for this procedure.